New Restoration

“A staggering high-wire act: an exquisite melodrama about the seedy underbelly of Paris imbued with the kind of flashy punctiliousness we’d typically associate with Golden Age-era filmmakers … The film carries the mantle of Demy while engaging the type of subject matter previously verboten in mainstream French cinema.”

Steve Macfarlane, Metrograph Journal

Paul Vecchiali, a gay iconoclast who operated on the fringes of the critic-cineaste tradition, made films about compulsions, desperate exiles, and self-scripted roles—patterns of desire that other filmmakers might unsubtly treat or pathologize. Rosa la rose, fille publique is one of his most approachable films, a near-musical display of style that aims to stun. Rosa (Marianne Basler) is a star among sex workers in Les Halles, Paris, where everyone, regardless of gender or profession, professes love to her in their own way. The film’s baseline, indebted to French poetic realism, is an omniscient, choreographed view of romance and its dangers, where Rosa’s gifts as a performer give her rarified status but only a semblance of freedom. Vecchiali, no less than the Godard of Vivre sa vie, knows that images of seduction and catharsis can act as both personal revelation and prescriptive narrative. The film starts with Rosa’s birthday; its conflicts stem from differing wish fulfillments.

In French with English subtitles

“The work of a filmmaker attentive to the queer and feminist rallying cries at the time … [Rosa] is neither willfully provocative nor limned with secret shame.”

Beatrice Loayza, The New York Times

“The ideal Diagonale film for the uninitiated, Rosa la rose, fille publique is a sparkling compendium of Vecchialisms: classical French melodrama recast in Parisian backstreets [under] the reigning influence of Demy, Ophüls, and even Guy de Maupassant.”

Patrick Preziosi, MUBI Notebook
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