Rosie is a poignant and timely depiction of homelessness in Dublin that follows a family of six over the course of 36 hours as they struggle to find housing. On Thursday night, following a screening of Rosie at the Light House Cinema, director Paddy Breathnach and screenwriter Roddy Doyle sat down for a question and answer session to speak about their collaborative effort in making the film. Ultimately, though, Rosie articulately and emotionally speaks for itself.
The film, according to its poster, was “inspired by too many true stories”, and Breathnach and Doyle drove this point home in their insistence on Rosie’s ordinariness. Doyle wrote the screenplay about a capable and typical working-class family: “He goes to work, she stays at home. Except they don’t have a home.” He described Rosie’s routine as being “like the routine of any parent – but put through a blender”. We are encouraged to empathise with Rosie, he said, because her day is “a distorted version of what we go through ourselves”.
Breathnach spoke of embracing the limitations of Doyle’s screenplay, as a significant portion of the film is set inside the family car, imbuing the final product with a destabilising, claustrophobic atmosphere. Breathnach discussed one choice he made in his direction: we very rarely look through the car window at Rosie and her family. We are thus inserted into the chaos, frustration and desperation of the family’s struggle to find shelter while maintaining their sense of pride, heightening the film’s sense of urgency.
Breathnach and Doyle emphasised that in making Rosie, they very deliberately avoided placing blame for the family’s plight on any one character or institution. Rosie is unlike other characters Doyle has written in that, throughout the film, she is not crude and does not drink or smoke. This is a conscious choice to restrict viewers from disregarding her struggles as somehow stemming from any fault of her own. To further avoid any easy interpretation of the homelessness crisis, Rosie does not place blame on bureaucrats or landlords. Doyle explained that while anger acts as a definite motivator in his writing, “anger alone won’t do it”. Rosie is not meant to point fingers. As Doyle pointed out, the film does have its moments of “terror, humiliation and shame”, but Breathnach remained insistent that Rosie is a film in which love is infinitely more important and more valuable than anger.
When asked whether he had learned anything he had not already known while writing Rosie, Doyle said he hadn’t. We are all aware of the homelessness crisis in Dublin. Rosie is an important film not because it will bring greater awareness to this crisis, but because it adamantly refuses to allow for a comfortable distinction between “us” and “them”. We do not observe Rosie on her heartbreaking journey – we join her.
But in what capacity can Rosie, or any film, affect issues as big as the homelessness crisis? It is Doyle’s hope that, at the very least, Rosie will “put faces on statistics” used when discussing homelessness. And Breathnach hopes that Rosie can and will be read as “a poem or a love song to a family” in a similar situation.
