Rose, a film about a 17th century woman who cross-dresses to gain her freedom

This new film by Austrian director Markus Schleinzer tells the incredible adventure of Rose, a 17th century woman who decided to disguise herself as a man to gain her freedom. Rose, awarded in Berlin for Sandra Huller's performance, is released in theaters on Wednesday September 9.

A man, in a soldier's costume, with a scar across his face, arrives in a small German village the day after the Thirty Years' War. He claims his inheritance: a farm, and the land that goes with it. Suspicious, the villagers bow to the official document presented by the soldier.

Despite his reluctance, the man settles on the farm, repairs the ruined buildings and cultivates the land around him. The villagers' eyes soften the day he saves one of their number from the clutches of a bear. The small community, which fills its time with work and masses, ends up adopting it, to the point that a man from the village offers her his daughter in marriage.

“Pants grant more rights”

To write this story, the director confides in the presentation of the film that he was inspired by the story of a woman executed in Halberstadt because she had pretended to be a man. “I explored hundreds of female trajectories across the centuries: women who, temporarily or permanently, donned masculine clothing to live publicly as men,” explains Markus Schleinzer, who also looked at “armored female soldiers and female pirates, marginal but very real figures.”

“I didn't want to be a man, but pants grant more rights, so I put them on,” declares Rose, whose behavior shows the power relations between men and women, confined to obeying their father, then their husband, giving birth and running their household. Sandra Huller composes a unique character, involving her entire body. With rigid postures, hands in the belt, jerky and complacent gait, chin forward, she makes us feel all the efforts that Rose makes to maintain the illusion. Postures to ape virility which also underline the ridiculousness of this ancestral obligation for men to “play” tough.

Rose attempts to gain her freedom in the midst of a corseted Protestant society, both literally and figuratively, which will make her pay dearly for her desire to disregard the precepts linked to her sex by refusing the life assigned to women of that time. “Rose is part of a precise historical framework, but inevitably resonates with the present,” underlines the director, worried in “this period where patriarchal structures, far from having disappeared, sometimes reassert themselves with force.”

The theatrical staging supports this idea of ​​a role-playing game where everyone plays their part. With realistic sets and costumes contrasting with a magnificent black and white setting a timeless pictorial atmosphere, and the powerful acting of Sandra Huller, the film takes us far into the gripping spectacle of a human adventure which says a lot about the status of women.

The sheet