In competition at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, whose winners for the 16th edition were unveiled on Sunday August 27, Rosalie, Stéphanie Di Giusto’s second feature film, won the prize for best music (Hania Rani) and best actress (Nadia Tereszkiewicz).

The director seizes on the myth of the “woman with a beard” to paint the moving portrait of a woman in search of love. A free woman, who claims the freedom to be herself and wants to be loved unconditionally, despite her difference. She refuses to submit to the norm and conventions of an era that is not ours but strangely resembles it.

“Rosalie is first and foremost a film about love, the most political question there is”, confides to Point the director of the film, who claims “a nuanced and universalist feminism”. Interview.

Le Point: Your heroine, Rosalie, is inspired by Clémentine Delait, barkeeper in the Vosges at the beginning of the 20th century, and known as a “woman with a beard”. What moved and interested you about the fate of this singular woman?

Stéphanie Di Giusto: What first interested me about her was her fierce desire not to be a fairground freak. When you see her in vintage photos, when you document her life, you first remember this: her desire to be fully in life, her desire to be seen as a woman, and that’s which upset me. I was touched by the look, the bizarre grace of this woman who could both assume her beard and assert her femininity, at the beginning of the 20th century.

For my part, I place my story in 1875, five years after the Franco-Prussian war. A rather particular climate prevails at this time; people are still bruised by the war, suspicious, wounded, a time that I found interesting to install my two characters, Abel (Benoît Magimel) and Rosalie (Nadia Tereszkiewicz).

Your film is not a biopic but the portrait of a free woman, who wants to assume what she is, live her femininity, and live it fully. In search of absolute love, she ignores conventions, frees herself from the gaze of the other. She wants to be loved as she is, unconditionally… Deep down she defends the freedom to be herself.

Exactly. Rosalie confronts the gaze of others and assumes her particular femininity, against the dictates of the time. Ultimately, she never sees herself and is approached as a victim; she will make her particularity a strength and that’s what fascinates me about her. She frees herself, she fights but at the same time, she hides to suffer and it’s also this complexity that I like about her. I like this duality between his rage to live and his modesty, his determination and his fragility.

Shouldn’t this be seen as a counterpoint to the feminism of the time, sometimes linked to a form of victimization? Rosalie suffers, she fights but she doesn’t want to be a victim, especially of men.

This is the subject of the film. I condemn that feminism which uses the status of the victim to practice, in turn, oppression and abuse of power; in my eyes, it is no longer a question of feminism but of identitarianism. I am for a nuanced, universalist feminism, which allows women to be what they want to be. Rosalie is gentle in her claim; she defends her freedom but she is in love and it was very important for me to show it. The era is more and more demanding, moralizing and I find that a shame. I didn’t want to give a lesson, I just wanted to talk about love. Because love, it seems to me, is the essential fight today. Love is an eminently political question, in a society that is becoming more and more dehumanized. In this, the period of the film resembles the one we are going through; there is conflict, suspicion, tension, we can no longer express ourselves freely…

Rosalie is a free and determined woman but she is also a quasi-saint. She sows love and joy wherever she goes. However, the village will never stop wanting to bring it into the norm, to the point of making it the scapegoat, the person responsible for all the disorders. This bearded woman will finally meet the same fate as the witches of the Middle Ages…

This too can be seen today: freedom disturbs because it is perceived as a threat. Rosalie will pay a high price for it, to the point, in fact, of becoming the scapegoat of the town. She refuses to go back to the norm – by shaving. It then becomes the cause of all problems, a curse. I read a lot about witchcraft trials and they inspired me a lot. Does human nature support difference? Do humans really yearn for freedom? These are also the questions of the film.

What is so subversive about this woman full of grace and beauty: the disorder of desire she arouses, despite her difference? His longing for freedom, threatening to those who deny it?

The only subversity that I see in Rosalie, and that I wanted to show, is her singular, unprecedented eroticism; a sensuality that is both delicate and animal. Deep down, this woman is very unsettling and I hope that the viewer will be embarrassed by the desire, the attraction and the trouble that this woman arouses. Our era never ceases to celebrate difference but deep down, it does not really support it. The film, itself, is the victim of a priori: to speak of “woman with a beard”, to reduce a human being to this attribute, isn’t that very reductive?

“We are not born a woman, we become one”, thought Simone de Beauvoir. At one point in the film, Rosalie observes that “it’s never easy being a woman”. With or without a beard…

We are born fighting. Yes, revealing yourself as a woman and assuming it is a constant struggle!

A word about the shooting conditions. How did you recreate your character’s hairiness, affected like the real Clémentine Delait by this genetic disease that medicine calls “hirsutism”?

I didn’t want to just stick a hairpiece on my character’s skin, like we usually do. I wanted Rosalie’s appearance to be worked on like a sculpture that one models, a strange and desirable sculpture. We worked a lot on the color, the texture of her hair… Mélanie Gerbeaux (the film’s make-up artist) did a real artistic job, sticking each hair one by one on Nadia’s face and body. So she got up at four in the morning. There were already two hours of work on the body and afterwards, we had to focus on the hairstyle, the dress, the corset, since we are in a period film… A gigantic transformation work had to be repeated every day .

Then, I didn’t want the actors to meet before shooting. We shot in chronological order and I wanted Nadia and Benoît to discover each other throughout the film, to slowly create feelings and desire, like their characters.

Nothing would have been possible for Rosalie without the help of Abel, her man (Benoît Magimel). It is through his gaze that the viewer can be seized in turn by his hypersensitivity. I wanted to give birth to something live, to install the emotion of the scene at the same time as it was turned. We really built the film with the actors.

Your film is also a reflection on the profession of actor, who is asked to forget himself, to forbid himself nothing, to enter into all skins, including the most difficult.

It’s true. In my first film, La Danseuse (2016), I told the story of an artist and there wasn’t much room for feelings. This time I wanted to get as close as possible to the human.

* Rosalie, by Stéphanie Di Giusto, scheduled for release in early 2024.