Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an exceptional historical fiction, doesn’t so much transport you to the past as it brings you to the edge of the translucent curtain that often obfuscates history from view. The stark monochrome drama follows a 17th-century woman in the guise of a man—such is the nomenclature used by the characters and the gentle narrator (Marisa Growaldt)—but its underlying emotional mechanics are distinctly queer. This brings to the fore the question of who and what the movie is really about, but that vital dilemma is nestled within the larger, more pressing, impeccably performed story of a person whose precarious freedom rests on a knife’s edge, resulting in Sandra Hüller being awarded the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance—her second time winning the trophy since Requiem in 2006.
Somewhere in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, a facially scarred soldier, referred to in voiceover only as Rose (Hüller), inherits farmland by impersonating a fallen comrade and establishes a homestead—a luxury only afforded to men. The narration sets the story’s parameters: that of a woman pretending to be a man as she tries to live free from the confines of structural misogyny. History is filled with women donning trousers to escape patriarchal norms, but also with likely transgender men who may have been conferred this designation in times and places where no such language for trans-ness existed. But whichever way a modern audience might interpret this story, its telling aligns—often intentionally—with that of the conservative Protestant villagers from whom Rose must hide the nature of her identity.
This isn’t so difficult at first since she lives alone, surrounded only by servants and farmhands with separate quarters, though out of caution, she still sleeps in a horizontal cupboard. However, it isn’t long before a neighboring farmer offers her his daughter’s hand, a proposal which Rose cannot convincingly refuse. Once the bride arrives—the young, homesick Suzanna (Caro Braun)—her daily routine becomes a captivating tightrope of deception.
Of course, injecting themes of duplicity into a narrative ostensibly of trans identity, even in its subtext, comes with contemporary concerns, given the harmful stereotypes of trans people trying to fool potential suitors or force their way into bathrooms under false pretenses, often resulting in real violence against them. While the filmmakers may not think of Rose as a transgender story, it speaks the language of one, and Hüller seems to have approached it with a grey area in mind (in an interview at the Berlinale, the actress mentioned taking inspiration from Albert Nobbs, the 2011 drama in which Glenn Close’s eponymous character walks a similar line). But even when Rose is viewed on its own terms—a lens it eventually justifies through some intriguing, contradictory dialogue about the character’s past—the film’s discomforts regarding modern queer issues become a key part of its text. For one thing, Rose keeping her supposed façade a secret is a matter of basic survival rather than deceit. For another, when minor characters begin to have their suspicions, their intense focus on her genitalia as proof positive of her lived truth can’t help but reflect the hateful pushback to modern trans liberation.
However, even if one were to adopt the simplest, or least controversial, version of the story, i.e., the saga of a woman pretending to be a male soldier, this would still afford Hüller the full spectrum of meaningful dramatic performance. There’s a broadness at first to Rose’s careful, stilted gesticulations, not to mention her short temper and verbose arguments, which might initially read to modern viewers as the overt performance of gender. However, hidden within this specter of social masculinity is an alluring authenticity. The more time we spend observing Rose, the harder it becomes to interpret her broad-shouldered rigidity, matched by cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz’s careful compositions, as anything but a product of deep-seated fear rather than trickery.
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ROSE ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) |
Hüller, from beneath her calculated gait and facial prosthetics, reveals Rose’s idiosyncrasies and anxieties, such as repeatedly chewing on the flattened bullet that scarred her cheek, which she keeps close by, tied around her neck. Death and pain are never far from her mind or from her body. The way she bristles at suggestions she doesn’t like or that endanger her secrets, or how she loses her cool with Suzanna even behind closed doors, can be traced to her dire need for self-preservation. It’s a magnificent performance—not for its pretense but for its raw emotional honesty. Though let it not go unsaid: Braun’s work as Suzanna, an initially restrained woman who slowly emerges from her shell, is just as captivating and offers Rose the complicated chance at something resembling honest companionship and thus true freedom, in whatever way it can exist for her.
The looming questions of trans-ness are answered and refuted by the text in equal measure, though the manner of each instance is key to how the film can be read. Rose does, in one moment, state that she had no intention of actually being a man, but the specifics of who she confesses this to, and why, make her an unreliable narrator (once again, it all comes back to her guiding survival instinct). The only other time the question is explicitly broached comes from the story’s narrator, who hints that Rose began experimenting with male dress from an early age. Who, here, is to be believed, and what are the underlying implications of this assertion in both a modern and historical context? Well, that’s a question worth confronting, but the movie makes determining this with any certainty difficult. Even the narrator’s view of this story feels incomplete, since she doesn’t ever mention the male name Rose gives to other people—something that may, the movie eventually suggests, have been lost to the pages of history alongside Rose’s firsthand accounts.
Whether Rose is a trans man trying to live authentically or a woman cross-dressing to escape oppression, the implied and explicit brutality upon being found out—and being seen as a woman trying to establish her place in the world—remains no less troubling by the time the credits roll. This is what ultimately makes Rose so engrossing and what helps situate Hüller’s performance within the overarching drama. While there’s only so much we can know about the character, given the distance at which she’s presented—usually, we can discern this only from what she says to other people and what’s said about her—the care and intimacy with which Schleinzer presents Rose make her uniquely compelling. She’s a protagonist whose desires are fundamentally at odds with the basic tenets of traditional cinema. She wants only to embody the mundane and the unremarkable, but the action around her repeatedly forces her into positions of bravery and principled stands.
In its mere 93 minutes, Rose creates an entire world that skirts along the edges of historicity, demanding that it be read in the vein of a dusty historical record on which we’re likely to project our modern understanding of social norms and perhaps even wrestle against them, to say nothing of trans viewers who might identify with the story. Whatever form the hero takes, the villains—whose violent bigotry comes dressed in the robes of religious conservatism—remain a terrifying historical echo. The result, in the end, is an enthralling drama that’ll rile you up for the right reasons if you let it.
