Page - 56 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

56 | Stefanie Knauss www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 45–66 it means dignity, normalcy, social recognition and permanence, as well as more material benefits such as unemployment insurance. While Rosetta’s struggle to find a job even at the cost of betraying a friend – her only friend – could be read as an expression of ruthless neo-liberal individualism, it can also be read as the painful consequence of her commitment to her primary relationship of care and solidarity with her mother. She uses her income not to improve her own situa- tion egotistically, but to ensure that her mother and she herself are able to live a life of relative dignity in their trailer and to establish a routine that will help her mother to control her addiction or even go to rehab. Given Riquet’s earlier presumption to know what is good for Rosetta, and her continuous rejection of offers of help, his final gesture of helping her up is all the more significant: at this point, Riquet simply offers his strength, holding out his hand, and allows Rosetta to decide for herself to accept it. The film’s final focus on Rosetta’s face affirms her as a subject even in this moment of dejection, and underlines a new understanding of relationship, not as a burden or limitation, but as an extension and affirmation of the self. The film’s complex treatment of relationship is complemented by its sober look at the sphere of the family. From the perspective of Christian social ethics, Hinze underlines that the family is a sphere in which the vulnerability of the hu- man person can be expressed in a protected space and the need for relational- ity is met, but “as the locus of special vulnerability – bodily, emotional, psychic – family and household are also places where the negative effects of sin and finitude can cut and scar intimately and deeply.”28 Rosetta’s family life is certain- ly not romanticized: living in (consciously) temporary quarters in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother, Rosetta experiences family mostly as a sphere of dependency, exploitation and despair, in which she is forced to take on burdens that go beyond her strength. For Rosetta, the roles of mother and child are switched: she takes care of her mother, earns the family’s income, offers emo- tional support for her mother, tries to protect her from sexual exploitation, and defines moral codes of conduct for her, for example when she insists that her mother can start drinking only after 6pm, or that they won’t accept gifts. When the exhaustion of having to care for an unresponsive mother and struggle for recognition in the labor market finally is too much, and Rosetta attempts to kill both her mother and herself, this can be taken as a warning that the continuous demands on women to sacrifice themselves on all fronts will end in catastrophe without greater structural and financial support for caregivers, in addition to a complementary social discourse of gender equality and protection of women’s 28 Hinze 2009, 68.