‘Rose’ Review: Sandra Hüller Brings Her A-Game To A Thoughtful Study Of Gender Roles In 17th-Century Germany – Berlin Film Festival
Sandra Hüller was the Queen of Cannes in 2023, starring in two of the most acclaimed films in the Competition: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Her return to the festival circuit is another remarkable piece of work, one that cements her reputation as a striking yet surprisingly […]
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Rose review – Sandra Hüller is outstanding in grimy examination of gender stereotypes
Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s captivating film follows a woman passing herself off a man in 17th-century rural Germany Austrian director Markus Schleinzer brings a chill to his eerie new movie, a stark monochrome period drama set in rural southern Germany in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ war. It is a film which, for all its grimness, is beautifully shot and as engrossing as a lurid soap opera. It’s a story of gender stereotypes, satirising the central mythic tenet of patriarchal Christianity and depicting humanity’s self-invention through violence and stealth. The chief influence is clearly Michael Haneke’s icy black-and-white film The White Ribbon from 2009, on which Schleinzer worked as casting director; Schleinzer shares with Haneke an interest in leaving the audience with an intractable, insoluble mystery: a problem that won’t tie up. The drama effectively conflates real-life cases of women passing themselves off as men in early modern Europe with the well-known case history of the French false claimant Martin Guerre. Sandra Hüller gives a superb performance as Rose, a young woman who has been posing as a man all her life and has been a soldier in this guise. She wears dour shapeless clothes, and has the brisk, brusque, economical physical movements of an old soldier; a livid scar that has transformed her face into a worldly and conveniently unfeminine grimace. She says it is the result of a bullet that she now wears around her neck on a cord, a kind of unlucky charm, a reminder of her survival. Continue reading...
By Peter Bradshaw
Read full article →‘Rose’ Review: Sandra Hüller Brings Her A-Game To A Thoughtful Study Of Gender Roles In 17th-Century Germany – Berlin Film Festival
Sandra Hüller was the Queen of Cannes in 2023, starring in two of the most acclaimed films in the Competition: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Her return to the festival circuit is another remarkable piece of work, one that cements her reputation as a striking yet surprisingly […]
By Damon Wise
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