NZIFF: Rose (2)

A heartrending, austere portrait of a physically and spiritually scarred woman returning to her postwar hometown in the 1600s, posing as a male soldier.

Horror is central in the tragic life of Rose (a transcendent Sandra Hüller), victim of a harrowing childhood and innumerable atrocities on the battlefields of the Thirty Years War, leaving her face disfigured from a bullet-wound. From an early age, she noticed the freedom a pair of trousers would afford her, and has since spent her life posing as a man.

With the war over, Rose travels to a remote German Protestant village, laying a dubious familial claim to a dilapidated stretch of farmland. Rose’s life is one of fabrications, careful deceptions, a delicate ecosystem of repression which begins to unravel when she is betrothed to a local’s daughter.

Cruelty and brutality are everywhere in Markus Schleinzer’s transfixing new film, but rarely shown on screen. Shot in rapturous black and white, it is a tough, Bergmanesque tragedy, shot through with a staggering humanism that flows from Hüller, who has quickly emerged as one of the most significant performers of our time.

It is not strictly a film about the transgender experience, but one about the terrible restraints we put on oppressed classes and the sacrifices they must make in order to live truthfully.

Phone: 06 835 7781

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