In “Rosalie” Nadia Tereshkevich plays a bearded woman who is captivated by her strangeness.

The opinion of the “world” – why not

A phenomenon of the fair, a monster among the monsters (the legless man, the Siamese sisters, the elephant man) who were in the heyday of the fairs for a century, the bearded woman did not escape the cinema, which gave her several variations. The most famous remains Annie Girardot in the feature film Marco Ferrer (1928-1997). The husband of the bearded lady. This noir film, with its brutal and provocative humor, was released in 1964 shortly after entering competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received very poor reviews. “despicable” by some critics. To the point that the ending, censored by producer Carlo Ponti, had three different versions, including Ferrer’s.

Nothing like that is hidden RosalieStephanie Di Giusto’s second feature film (a dancer, 2016), who, unlike the Italian filmmaker, removes all brutality and savagery in favor of a half-tone painting with rounded corners, within which the bearded woman takes on the characteristics of a modern heroine, determined to show off and have. His strangeness was accepted. The approach might seem laudable if the modernity of the character adopted by the director did not conflict with the academicism of the scenery, costumes and staging, thus creating a somewhat anachronistic and awkward dissonance.

The effect produced tends to make the statement demonstrative and to make the subject artificial. However, which was inspired by the most famous – and proudest – bearded woman of all time, Clementine Delight, born in the Vosges in 1865, where she died in 1939. Not that she lived to the end, traveled a lot and pretended to wear men’s clothes. costumes. Married, owner of two cafes, where customers came to see her, a young woman suffering from hirsutism stopped shaving at the age of 36 and decided to even pose as she was for the purpose of selling.

hairy body

Stephanie Di Giusto’s film takes place in 1870 and her character, Rosalie (Nadia Tereskevic), is hardly far from her model, except for her silhouette – more refined and petite – and the tenderness that permeates her gestures and phrases in the place where she is going to live. Or a small Breton village subject to the power of a wealthy owner (Benjamin Beaulais) whose factory employs almost all the residents. It is here that a young woman (clean-shaven, well-dressed, carefully dressed flowers in her blond hair) comes to meet for the first time her future husband, who was promised to her, Abel (Benoît Magimel), a nice little hermit and heavily in debt because customers abandoned his cafe. Most interested in the young woman’s dowry and no less seduced by her radiant beauty, he immediately marries her.