Given the narrative overlaps and echoes, we’d as properly state the apparent: Markus Schleinzer’s “Rose” performs, in a way, as a distant, Germanic cousin to “Boys Don’t Cry.” Each movies recount true tales of strangers assigned feminine at delivery who current as male, arriving in new cities the place they rapidly discover companionship and group. In every case, these bonds can’t stand up to the power of gender policing, resulting in tragic ends formed by comparable prejudices. However the two paths diverge in tense.
Whereas Kimberly Peirce’s ’90s-set, ’90s-shot Oscar winner sought to impress the right here and now — its pathos designed, no less than partly, to impress outrage and push the tradition ahead — Schleinzer appears to be like far backward, refracting modern mores and expectations via an austere, alien gentle.
Set in Seventeenth-century Prussia and premiering in present-day Berlin, Schleinzer’s movie resists a simple modern trans studying. As signaled by its title, by a voice-over that persistently makes use of feminine pronouns, and by the character’s personal admission, “Rose” follows a girl who sees in gender efficiency probably the most quick and self-evident type of emancipation. “There’s extra freedom in trousers,” she says succinctly.
Nonetheless, Rose (Sandra Hüller) is basically a girl of few phrases (for readability, and in line with the movie’s framing, we’ll retain feminine pronouns). She discovered freedom as a soldier within the Thirty Years’ Struggle and took a bullet to the face within the course of. The slug now hangs from a sequence round her neck, just under the lengthy scar alongside her left cheek, leaving her with a faint, everlasting half-smile. In a time of rebuilding, and together with her wartime valor etched plainly on her face, few within the village query her when she arrives to assert a fallen comrade’s farmhouse.
We too perceive Rose via motion — or the dearth thereof. She stands quiet and nonetheless as a marauding black bear prowls close by, utilizing her stillness as a defend and hiding in plain sight. Hazard passes with the seasons, bringing prosperity, integration, and new dangers. Rose’s freedom comes at a price: the expectation to forge deeper financial ties with the group via the property alternate generally known as marriage. Right here, marital contracts betroth two consenting businessmen, holding the bride as collateral — and whereas Rose initially donned trousers and sure her breasts to flee this chattel system, her (reasonably literal) manumission now carries the expectation that she purchase in.
Academically paced but by no means sluggish, “Rose” unfolds with the identical measured deliberation as its protagonist. Schleinzer calls for — and rewards — shut consideration, revealing narrative twists and ethical dilemmas with quiet precision. By means of inflexible, coal-and-ash–toned static photographs, he constructs a period-accurate moral minefield, letting us inhabit its unfamiliar terrain earlier than confronting us with every new problem to trendy codes. Intellectually, the movie is as gripping because it will get.
The movie proves particularly nimble with Rose’s spouse. Suzanna (Caro Braun) enters the family as property, subtly shifting right into a ticking time bomb beneath the social and contractual expectation that she quickly conceive — and shifting once more as soon as she really does. With out overstatement or any flip towards magical realism, her shock being pregnant lands as a darkish punchline, given the unfruitful instrument Rose makes use of to undergo the motions, and takes on a far bleaker weight after we recall her father’s eagerness to safe her a marital mattress.
That grim suggestion — by no means acknowledged and all of the extra highly effective for it — reveals within the easy arch of Hüller’s forehead, one among many refined gestures in one other commanding efficiency. Nearly by no means offscreen, Hüller — and Braun, who has much less screentime however is not any much less affecting — navigate unfamiliar conditions with small, exact selections and reactions that minimize via the intentionally alienating interval setting, imparting an emotional vitality that feels each present and relatable.
Such immediacy is all of the extra outstanding given the filmmaker’s sensibility. For his half, Schleinzer appears to be like even additional into the previous, staging a lot of the movie’s closing act in direct visible reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece “The Ardour of Joan of Arc.” Lengthy earlier than her sainthood — and her cinematic canonization — Joan of Arc herself was executed for gender nonconformity. That reality could also be inconvenient for these desirous to sanctify previous prejudices. Schleinzer retains it squarely in view.
