Rosalie

 

A portrait of a young woman suffering from hirsutism in 1870s provincial France, Rosalie is inspired by the life of the real "lady with the beard", Clémentine Delait. Rosalie is akin to a Stations of the Cross, a punishment spiral for a circus freak. But Stéphanie Di Giusto is more fascinated by the emancipation - body positivism avant la lettre - of this heroine who is thrown into an arranged marriage with a middle-aged café owner (Benoît Magimel). At first he doesn't know her hairy secret, and the scene of the wedding night is a must-see for anyone who entered the cinema without knowing anything of the synopsis. Shouldn't he be the happiest man when he unwraps his trembling wife like a Christmas present?

 

Instead of portraying a strict peasant community, the film mostly revolves around the sexual confusion that the sensual Rosalie (Nadia Tereszkiewicz, strangely convincing) will eventually provoke, once she accepts herself as a phenomenon and stops hiding the hair on her chest and chin.