Walerian Borowczyk had experimented with live action a little bit before, most notably in The Museum, and it's to be assumed that shorts like Holy Smoke! and Les astronautes involved directing actors to come up with the facial expressions he would then add into his collages. Rosalie, though, is his first sustained attempt at capturing a performance, and it's truly breathtaking. The performance in question is by his then wife, credited simply as "Ligia". She is shot against a plain white background, the only prop being a simple structure in front of her designed to suggest the witness stand of a courtroom. Intercut are objects - a photo here, a bit of knitting there - that either represent or somehow comment on her monologue. I didn't object to these being there, but Ligia's incredible, raw performance could have easily carried the short on its own. Borowczyk, though, wanted more, and took the short to a new level. The opening scene, in which we hear Rosalie's sobbing over a slow pan across the pieces of evidence against her, is incredibly powerful.Rosalie is an adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant short story I haven't read, about a servant girl on trial for killing her newborn twins. This film is so unmistakably Boro's that I was thinking of classifying it as hypothetical cinema, where an adaptation takes several imaginative leaps to deal with the lack of resources required to mount a more conventional production of this text. But the structure - a brief explanatory paragraph followed by a long, subjective monologue - is exactly that of Mouche, one of the few de Maupassant stories I have read. Perhaps the original text was like this as well. Either way, Walerian and Ligia make it entirely theirs, and the closing caption is the most affecting one I've seen since Pride. Unreservedly recommended.
