Rosie: Life on the Street Can Be Really Neat Through the Eyes of a Precocious Child
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
You can’t blame a filmmaker for wanting to lighten a mood, especially when the themes are heavy. In her feature debut Rosie, Metis writer-director Gail Maurice gives us a portrait of outsider/street life that is improbably upbeat and sweet.
The themes? Rosie (ready-for-Hollywood child actress Keris Hope Hill) is a little girl whose mother has died, and who is assigned by child services to the care of her Francophone aunt, Frédèrique (Melanie Bray), a.k.a. “Fred.”
Mélanie Bray, Keris Hope Hill, Alex Trahan and Constant Bernard in Rosie.
That Rosie is Anglophone, from a family of adoptees, some of whom are Indigenous, suggests a fractured homelife that likely resulted from the Sixties Scoop (though this isn’t really spelled out).
Even without that backdrop, dumping the child on a single woman with issues, who can’t keep a job, can’t sell her art, and is constantly on the verge of homelessness, seems counterintuitive to say the least. And having done so, it figures that the last act of the movie will involve fighting back when child services cruelly reverses course.
Still, Hill’s Rosie is an indefatigable little optimist who even seems capable of turning eviction into an adventure.
Happily, Fred has two adorable drag-scene besties Flo (Constant Bernard) and Mo (Alex Trahan). They each have their traumatic past, but when they’re together, positivity flows from the screen with the intensity of a fire hose. And they eagerly take to the introduction of a child into their lives.
Flo and Mo’s presence serves an obvious purpose in Maurice’s narrative, to underline the notion that a family is what you make of it. It seems that across the board, the characters carry the burden of their own childhood, which presumably motivates them to do better the second time around.
Traumas notwithstanding, the main characters are all adorable, including Jigger (Brandon Oakes), the twinkle-eyed homeless guy on the corner, who takes to teaching Rosie Cree.
There will be a happy resolution, of course. Rosie is tragedy uplifted and leavened by positivity into something that is intended to leave the audience smiling. It’s preferable to gloom, I suppose.
Rosie. Written and directed by Gail Maurice. Starring Keris Hope Hill, Mélanie Bray, Constant Bernard, Alex Trahan. Opens across Canada, Friday, November 11.