Not to judge a film from the synopsis established by its marketing team, but those expecting director Aurélie Saada’s debut Rose––a 2021 Locarno premiere only now arriving on U.S. shores––to be a more explosive character drama in the vein of Arnaud Desplechin will be sorely disappointed. This late-in-life coming-of-age story is billed as the tale of a woman’s belated self-discovery causing unexpected rifts among her family in the wake of her husband’s death. And on paper it sounds like the recipe for a spiritual successor to A Christmas Tale, with the personal and professional hang-ups of her adult children––ranging from marriage breakdowns to the looming threat of jail time––all taking precedence in their lives over her trauma. Where Desplechin would embrace the soapy melodramatics of such material, Saada, in practice, aims to play them down as much as possible, and the result is frustrating. Only in the moments where she allows her protagonist to spend time away from her turbulent relatives does this approach work. When she’s with them, all interest gets lost beneath layers of cliched and underdeveloped interpersonal conflicts.
Françoise Fabian plays the widow at the center of the drama, introduced in an extended prologue celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary. This time of celebration is gifted more than an undercurrent of doom when her doctor son Pierre (Grégory Montel) takes her husband to one side to give him the troubling results of a recent MRI scan; moments later we’re weeks since his death, the emotional weight of a decades-long marriage lost beneath clumsy exposition about his health in the one scene we got to see the couple together. Her children, however, have been exposed enough to their close bond that they feel concerned about her well-being, a factor conveyed in the script which feels missing from the screen, where their attempts to anchor her back into a personal life and daily routine surrounded by loved ones, as well-meaning as they are, strip away some of her agency.
Fabian’s performance narrowly stops Rose from being the forgettable sum of its formulaic parts, silently conveying the weight of a woman newly navigating life as a 78-year-old widow with a grace which might mislead you into assuming there was more dramatic heft on the page. It’s a shame that the film around her feels so devoid of insight into her emotional state, relying on the hackiest of clichés––e.g. accepting to smoke a joint for the first time at a bourgeois dinner party––to demonstrate just how much the tragedy has shifted her outlook on life. One could argue that the lack of depth to her characterization is because we’re seeing her through the eyes of her children, whose differing perceptions of her have all been shattered by this unmooring of the family unit, now rendering her an uncertain blank slate. But this charitable reading requires suspending belief and assuming they’ve been given richer characterizations in comparison. Despite having the kinds of jobs you’d expect in a bohemian, upper-middle-class family drama––the straight-laced doctor, the free-spirit choreographer daughter (Aure Atika), the wayward son (Damien Chapelle) awaiting a court verdict for a shady business scheme––the characters are oddly devoid of quirk, baseline archetypes the actors struggle to give any unique personality.
When separated from them, such as in an almost, not-quite-moving subplot where Saada begins a fleeting sexual relationship with a younger bartender (Pascal Elbé), she seems on the peripheries of genuine insight about returning to normal after a distinctly romantic grief. But even this fails to live up to its complete potential, shying from exploring the character’s belated sexual reawakening in a manner I can only describe as uncharacteristically French, affording Rose the second relationship of a barely 100-minute film whose full emotional weight the audience never comprehends. The writer-director’s aim to blend the family drama with a love letter to her own African-Jewish heritage is largely watered-down to the broadest of strokes alongside it, a personal tale rooted in her own culture which feels surprisingly inauthentic by way of just how underdeveloped her characters are. This is a world she knows intimately, but without anybody to make the human drama inside it worth investment; it might as well be the product of a tourist.
Grief is a messy experience, and Saada’s film never manages to grapple with how much of an impact it can still have that late in life. It’s too neat a portrayal of an emotionally turbulent moment––a Rose I wish had more thorns.
Rose is now in theaters.