Aurélie Saada is a composer, actress, and writer who directed her first movie, released in 2021. Rose is a 103-minute drama about an older French woman that loses her husband and finds a new zest for life, which upsets her family. The movie starts with a glimpse of Rose and her husband’s relationship. At a celebration, they are affectionate and loving toward each other, but it is clear that Rose is the more conservative of the two. She does not drink while her husband imbibes, but they dance together. The movie quickly paints a picture of a long-standing couple that genuinely love each other. Cutting to the aftermath of his death, Rose is in mourning and is lost without her husband. After being forced to get out of her house and interact with people, she has a great time at a dinner party where she tries pot and sings songs. She forgets about her son’s court date and ends up redeeming a spa treatment he gifted her at the same time. Feeling guilty, she goes to a bar and pours her heart out to a bartender roughly her oldest son’s age. This leads to dancing and then some mattress dancing (a one-night stand). She takes out her deceased husband’s car despite not having much experience behind the wheel. There was a chuckle-worthy scene with her trying to figure out the controls in the garage.

While she is experiencing a kind of revival of life, her children are struggling. Her daughter’s marriage is falling apart, and Rose is too blinded by her new-found joy of life to notice that the woman wants to tell her something. Her youngest son still lives with her and acts totally dependent. When he complains about the food at a family dinner, she snaps at him to cook his own meals. Her relationship with her children continues to sour as they find out that she has been seeing the bartender.

The movie is well shot and has an interesting mix of lighting and use of colors. Some scenes are drab with a lot of browns when she is alone in mourning, but a scene where she is cooking for her new Beau is flooded with light and has yellow and teal as the primary colors. The family confronts her after she falls down after a night of drinking with strangers with which she made fast friends. The movie ends with her giving her children a speech about life, which comes across as confusing, messy, but poignant (much like life).

The special features are limited. There is a 43-minute Q&A with the director and a theatrical trailer. The Q&A is held remotely via a webcam. The idea for the movie came to Saada after her husband left her. She thought her life was over at thirty years old. When she realized that she could still experience happiness, she felt a rebirth. Being of Jewish-Tunisian decent, she put a lot of herself and her life into the film even though the protagonist is much older than the writer/director. A dinner party she describes in the interview closely lines up with a scene in the film, making me wonder how much of the film is fiction and how much is biographical.

While I was not the target audience for this movie, it was an interesting character study that had well-crafted moments of showing and not telling. Short on special features, the release has to lean heavily on the quality of the film. Luckily, it is a well crafted movie that utilized personal experience for authenticity. If a person is a fan of character driven dramas, I would recommend “Rose”.