THIS was considered a controversial choice when it scooped the coveted "Palme d'Or" for the best film of the 1999 Cannes film festival. You can see what the fuss was about.

The story of a girl's desperate attempts to lift herself out of a mire of poverty and rejection, it is understated, bleak and emotionally distant. The central figure of the film, Rosetta, is an uncommunicative, psychologically distraught woman living with her alcoholic mother on a seedy caravan park. Socially awkward, quietly desperate, she finds it impossible to even maintain a menial job. She's down and she's going even lower.

Typical of the films of this ilk, "Rosetta" makes much use of real time action to emphasise the mundanity of the girl's life. Another technique, which is more exciting, is the use of shaky handheld camera, which gets shakier as the emotional pitch rises. It's hardly Saturday-night-at-the-movies stuff. But that's the point. The pace and the despairing nature of the film is testing, but as a study of a human being in crisis this is clear and honest.

Emilie Dequenne plays the downtrodden and desperate-for-work Rosetta with a palpable sense of suppressed anguish. Fabrizio Rongione, as the sympathetic waffle-vendor she befriends, provides a welcome light to her darkness.

The Dardenne brothers, to their credit, are unswervingly committed to their bleak vision, a vision which is laced with a very dark humour. By the time you make it to the end, the story hits resonant depths.