Film of the Week #18: Rosa la Rose, Fille Publique
Upcoming screenings of Rosa la Rose, Fille Publique provide an occasion for more filmgoers to discover the invigorating work of director Paul Vecchiali
When I see the valiant efforts of film programmers and distributors who help make underseen film artists better known to the broader movie-going public, I feel a certain optimism that no amount of boring industry-approved listicles can quash. In modern film culture, where so much of a premium is placed on empty signs of value like rankings, aggregation and awards, it can feel like an uphill battle trying to promote directors of substance from cinema’s past. But every time cinephiles work together to bring restorations of older films by important directors, I feel an urge to evangelize building up within me.
And so, it warms my heart to see cinephiles come together to put Rosa La Rose, Fille Publique – a film that wasn’t even available to access online anywhere prior to a few years ago – into the spotlight. We are long past due for a wider recognition of the films of the French film director Paul Vecchiali who passed away in 2023 after a long and vibrant filmmaking career. Vecchiali founded the Diagonale production company, which centered around a group of filmmakers who sought to share resources and escape certain production norms of the time. Diagonale helped produce Jeanne Dielmann, establishing Chantal Akerman as one the most vital artists in world cinema. Aside from that film, the output of the Diagonale has not received the kind of attention afforded to the leading figures of the French New Wave. But thanks to some screenings in New York, including showings of Rosa La Rose at the Quad Cinema in 2018 and a retrospective of films produced by Vecchiali that Metrograph hosted in 2023, Vecchiali’s directorial work, and Diagonale films in general, are starting to gain a wider profile.
On the occasion of the new digital restoration of Rosa La Rose, Fille Publique, I wanted to discuss the film and Vecchiali’s approach to performance style. Vecchiali creates a fully-imagined ecosystem of prostitutes and their male security/business operators working in the Les Halles district of Paris. The film’s theatrical performance style establishes a baseline of exaggerated ebullience. Darker undercurrents threaten to undermine the artificial cheeriness that seems to sustain this community. At the start of the film, Vecchiali showcases the charismatically glib manner through which the protagonist Rosa (Marianne Basler) interacts with her potential clients. Basler’s performance feels theatrical in a way that squares with her need to put up a seductive facade. In the film’s first scene she playfully reprimands a mustachioed client for asking if he could spend the night with her. Right off the bat, Vecchiali establishes both Rosa’s graciousness to potential clients and also the sense that she is firm about the ground rules of her trade. After walking toward another client, she circles back to the mustachioed client and suggests that they have a threesome.
Vecchiali gives the impression that Rosa’s trade is something of a game and the rules of said game require a certain kind of playful detachment. If anybody breaks the rules of this game, there may be consequences. But as is the case with the mustachioed client, once the players learn about the rules, they can redeem themselves for any breaches in etiquette. I reference “the rules of the game” partially because I think the behavioral codes that the characters follow recall those of the bourgeois vacationers depicted in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. (Vecchiali dedicates the film to a list of directors including Jean Renoir.) In Rosa La Rose, Vecchiali evokes Renoir through the theatrical manner in which certain characters perform, oftentimes acting as if directly addressing the audience. This performance style both operates as a pure form of pleasure for the audience and as an indication of a superficial manner of interaction that allows the principals to avoid confronting the conflicts within the community. In The Rules of the Game, the cheery facade that the bourgeois characters display functions as something of a mask that conceals tensions involving the adultery and class resentment that end up exploding by the end of the film. Similarly, in Rosa la Rose, Vecchiali has the members of this prostitution ring act in an exaggeratedly amicable manner with each other. It is not so much that there is no warmth between these people, but rather, that it exists to suppress the exploitation and cruelty at the heart of their enterprise. So the detached playfulness functions both as a source of entertainment for the audience and a kind of code of conduct that keeps their business afloat. This code of conduct applies to the clients of the prostitutes as well, as seen in the first seen when Rosa rejects the mustachioed client’s attempts to insinuate himself more fully into Rosa’s life. Rosa’s artificially cheery demeanor is a mask that prevents her clients from intervening directly into her life and disrupting her business.
Initially, the film's theatrical register serves to highlight the artifice of performed intimacy. Vecchiali allows us to take pleasure in the artifice, grounded as it is by Rosa’s practical handling of her business affairs. After Rosa informs the mustachioed client of his transgressions, she takes both men arm-in-arm and the camera cranes up as they walk off to their destination. This ascending movement creates a sense of elation, as if the camera itself is swept up in the fantasy of this world of sexual freedom and delight. Vecchiali stages the prior interaction with a long take in which the camera repositions itself in a kind of dance with the actors. This is not a cold, clinical business agreement, but rather a kind of show that Rosa is putting on — both for her clients and for the audience. Rosa displays a similarly theatrical mode of address as she sings a song at her birthday party to the other people who work for this prostitution ring. Vecchiali creates the sense that all of the principals involved in this production know their roles and seamlessly set up Rosa to give a captivating performance. After the song and dance, the characters all sit on one side of a long table, which calls to mind Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper. The perfectly choreographed movements of the actors make them seem like mechanized marionettes that create the illusion of perfect harmony. Rosa sings the words “God, life would be simple if I could believe in fantasy!” and the spell of this illusion is progressively broken over the course of the remaining film. Rosa’s life gradually begins to seem less and less idyllic as the film progresses. But even as the film charts Rosa’s descent into misery and madness, the air of fantasy and sexual bliss lingers over the rest of the film.
Vecchiali maintains this fantastical tone of playfulness through the sex scenes in the first half of the film. After the aforementioned birthday lunch, Rosa sees a client who is wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. He pulls out a plate of duck and we soon learn that the client is attempting to do some kind of role play where he pretends to be married to Rosa. Initially Rosa does not seem to be fully playing along. When the client offers her duck, she says she is not hungry because she just had her birthday lunch. The client responds that she can just pretend to eat, which leads Rosa to mime bringing some duck onto her plate and eating. Then, on the drop of a dime, the tone of the scene shifts drastically. Rosa changes into red lingerie and starts to pretend to be as a domineering wife who suspects his husband of cheating on her with a prostitute. In a hilarious turn, Rosa angrily tells the client to strip off his clothes so she can wash him all over, especially his “willy.” After she sprays him with the shower head all over, they embrace and the client starts to cry, hinting at some of the sadness that might be underlying this BDSM-esque role play. If we have established that Rosa treats her trade as a kind of game in which playacting and fantasy are involved, this client plays by the rules. Ultimately this role play is a way for Rosa and the client to keep each other at arm’s length and to stoke the fantasy while keeping details of their personal lives off the table. Vecchiali handles the abrupt shifts in tone with total finesse, and the characters play their roles with unhinged inventiveness.
But strangely enough, it is the introduction of a character who might have some kind of stronger connection to Rosa ends up breaking the spell of fantasy. A painter named Julien (Pierre Cosso) intrudes into Rosa’s life in a way that throws both her professional and personal life into chaos. Julien’s performance differs from the more theatrical modes of the other clients and clients within the prostitution ring. He has a more brooding, method-ish quality that calls to mind James Dean and Marlon Brando (there is a picture of Brando next to the mirror in Rosa’s room.) Julien refuses to engage in the kind of artificial banter that Rosa trades with her other clients. Vecchiali shows us that Julien is dead-serious about pursuing Rosa outside the realm of sex work.
I’ve noticed that log-lines tend to say that the drama of the film is initiated by Rosa falling for Julien. On the surface, that logline might hold water. But I think it is less that Rosa is head over heels in love with Julien, and more that the power of what she feels for Julien is foreign, destabilizing and difficult to categorize. Their first sex scene together begins with Rosa not moving much and not undressing. As opposed to her light, playful bearing in other scenes, here she becomes cold and reserved. When she lies on the bed and her head leans down off the edge of the bed, it almost appears that she is playing dead. But soon enough, she starts to engage in passion with Julien in a way that feels more grounded and less theatrical than her other encounters. Whether or not Rosa is truly in love with Julien, it becomes clear that something has changed within her.
Rosa’s interaction with Julien appears to upset the dynamic between her and her pimp, a brusque yet affectionate businessman played with steely reserve by Jean Sorel. Aside from their business arrangement, Gilbert and Rosa have something of a romantic relationship with one another. After her sex scene with Julien, Rosa asks Gilbert whether he would allow her to leave if she wanted to. Gilbert cheerily says she would grant her “the freedom she never lost.” After Rosa hears this, she sits on Gilbert’s lap and acts affectionately toward Gilbert. Gilbert then questions whether Rosa is actually going to leave him behind, to which Rosa replies that she is not going to leave and she just wanted to know whether Gilbert would approve of her leaving. Gilbert responds to Rosa staying by saying that it is good she is staying because if she left it would be a sign she found a man, which in Gilbert’s opinion, would be bad for Rosa. After this statement, Rosa bears a look of consternation. We obviously do not know what Rosa is thinking in the moment, but we can potentially speculate that she does not like Gilbert’s implication that the only thing that would drive her away from sex work would be if she was shacked up with a man. Gilbert then gravely tells Rosa to give him five more years in the business, after which Gilbert plans to retire. While this scene is well acted and directed, I feel that Vecchiali does not handle this change in tone as effectively as in other scenes. Gilbert’s transition from carefree benevolence to cold severity feels a bit contrived to me, almost like a mechanism dictated by the plot’s necessities. The mystery of why Gilbert would go from seemingly granting Rosa the ability to leave and then taking that back is not adequately contextualized, which leads to a feeling of incoherence.
My issue with the aforementioned scene is pretty much my only gripe with an otherwise marvelous film. In the second half of the film, Vecchiali creates a devastating portrait of Rosa trying to grapple with how to navigate her newfound sensations with Julien and her sense of being imprisoned by her obligations to Gilbert. It makes tragic sense that Julien, by refusing to play by the rules laid out within the ecosystem of sex work, ends up leading the ecosystem to combust. This reminds me of how Jean Renoir characterizes the character of Jurieu in The Rules of the Game. As Renoir stated, Jurieu’s sin “is that he brings into one caste the ideas of another… And the fact that is honest and pure renders him much more dangerous.” Renoir then refers to Jurieu as a microbe that could “kill a whole body.” Julien, by bringing his passion and possessiveness into this ecosystem, threatens to destroy the foundations of both Gilbert’s business and Rosa’s mental stability. Julien’s tragic flaw is the sincerity that clashes with the rules of the game that the prostitutes of the Halles neighborhood have laid down. These rules were put into place to keep this system of exploitation intact, so in some way Julien’s honest romantic pursuit of Rosa seems like something of a positive development. But like in The Rules of the Game, there are consequences for breaking the rules, and by the end of the film we see that Rosa has paid the price for allowing Julien into her orbit.