Sandra Hüller was the Queen of Cannes in 2023, starring in two of the most acclaimed films in the Competition: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Her return to the festival circuit is another remarkable piece of work, one that cements her reputation as a striking yet surprisingly chameleonic talent with Tilda Swinton’s eye for dark but intellectually rewarding material. Rose is such a project, a historical drama that plays out like a folk tale, an aggregate of many similar true-life stories — some detected, others not — lightly fictionalized and thoughtfully distilled into one.
The director is Markus Schleinzer, who did something similar in his jaw-dropping 2011 debut Michael, a character study inspired by a real-life child molester who, in 1998, kidnapped a young girl and kept her captive in a secret room under his garage. Though not for the faint-hearted, Michael was surprisingly sensitive in its execution, deftly sketching the banal details of the criminal’s otherwise normal, suburban life. In this respect, Rose is a companion piece, being the story of another ordinary man, a struggling farmer in early 17th century Germany. The twist here, however, is that this man is actually a woman.
Though also an actor himself, Schleinzer established a name for himself as Michael Haneke’s casting director, and it’s clear the two share a very similar aesthetic. The rustic limbo where Rose takes place, filmed in exquisite black and white, could be a location from Haneke’s The White Ribbon, and every actor, from the core cast to the extras, looks weather-beaten and perfectly at home there. It’s a village outside of time, which might explain why its unworldly residents take a mysterious stranger at face value when he arrives to claim his inheritance, a rundown farmstead that once belonged to his father.
This man, whose assumed name is never mentioned, is actually Rose (Hüller), who we are told, “has turned her back on the life of a soldier”. Part of the reason for her sudden retirement, she later explains, is a close shave with death she had when a bullet passed through her mouth, leaving her with a Joker-style grimace and a droopy right eye. With her hair in a very ’70s-looking feather-cut, Rose isn’t at all masculine, but she’s convincingly androgynous for the villager elders to hand over the farm. It’s hardly a bargain; the main building has been in ruins for a decade, and any livestock has long since perished.
Nevertheless, though she is heavily warned against it (the job “demands everything for only a little yield”), Rose gets to work and turns the farm around, finding work for the townspeople and commanding their undying respect after slaying a wild bear. Rose’s attempts to make a success of her life will be her undoing, however, a fate that begins to unfold when a neighbouring landowner offers her his daughter, Suzanna (Caro Braun). They are duly married, and Rose is pressured into having children — a clear impossibility, but which comes to pass when Suzanna reveals that she is pregnant (the main suspect being her father and his suspicious haste to see his offspring married).
Not surprisingly, Rose doesn’t take well to fatherhood, but nobody gives it any thought, not even Suzanna, who Rose has been making love to with a strap-on bull’s horn. It is only when Rose goes into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting that Suzanna, on stripping down The Master, discovers Rose’s secret. Suzanna is horrified and demands Rose leave. But after further consideration, Rose is able to convince Suzanna to leave things as they are. “You don’t belong to yourself,” says Rose, pointing out that, if she leaves, Suzanna’s father will simply pimp her out to the next passing trader. The uneasy truce that follows is the crux of Schleinzer’s slight but meticulously crafted film; Rose is a good husband, a hard worker and a trusted member of the community who pays decent wages and a bonus at Christmas. But if word gets out, both will be finished.
Although it comes along at a time when transgender issues are increasingly in the news, Rose is not about a woman who wants to be a man, it’s a film about a woman who chooses to present as a man, just because “there is more freedom in trousers”. It’s a devastatingly simple concept, and yet cross-dressing is a crime with serious consequences at this moment in time (she will later be called “a deceiver of land and folk”). Schleinzer’s thoughts on the matter are pretty clear; one of the first images we see in the film is a shallow grave filled with skeletal remains. In the forever wars between the sexes, death settles every score.
Title: Rose
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Markus Schleinzer
Screenwriters: Markus Schleinzer, Stuart Evers.
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Caro Braun, Marisa Growaldt, Godehard Giese, Augustino Renken
Sales: The Match Factory
Running time: 1 hr 33 mins