By Nadine Whitney

France, 1870s. Rosalie is a young woman unlike any other. She hides a secret: she was born with a face and body covered in hair. She’s concealed her peculiarity all her life to stay safe, shaving to fit in. Until Abel, an indebted bar owner unaware of her secret, marries Rosalie for her dowry. Will Abel be able to love Rosalie and see her as the woman she is, once he finds out the truth? Loosely based on the life of Clémentine Delait – Stéphanie Di Giusto’s ‘Rosalie’ is a story about radical love in a time when love was scarce.

“People who would rather see me at a fairground. Or a cave. It’s not simple being a woman.” – Rosalie Deluc

French-Finnish actor Nadia Tereszkiewicz appears on my computer screen and suddenly there is a lightness and radiance that emanates. The first thing I say is, “You are luminous.” I’m not only referring to her performance in Stéphanie Di Giusto’s period romance ‘Rosalie’ in which Nadia plays a woman with hirsutism who claims her space to be adored, but to Nadia and her smile.

Nadine: I was stunned by how absolutely beautiful you were in every stage of Rosalie, and I have found that in all your performances. I think I first encountered in your small role with Stephanie in “The Dancer” (a biography of Loïe Fuller, starring Soko) and then perhaps in “Only the Animals” and Monia Chokri’s “Babysitter.”

Nadia: In “The Dancer,” you can barely see me. I don’t say anything, it’s such a small part. But “Babysitter!” I love it.

Nadine: You were so powerful in “Babysitter” and in “Rosalie” you are powerful in a similar way. Your femininity and vulnerability are part of your strength. You become extremely rebellious and stand your ground. When I was reading an interview with Stéphanie, she said she had written the part but didn’t know who was going to be her Rosalie until she saw you. Why do you think she was drawn to you, specifically?

Nadia: I don’t know. What Stéphanie told me is what she liked was the fact I didn’t regard myself in the mirror when we were working. I forgot the beard when I started the scenes. I was already somewhere else because the film is a love story more than it is about beauty. It was the story of a young woman who needs to be loved and desperately wants to love. Rosalie has so much desire and one of them is to be free – to be herself.

I think these kinds of issues are very close to me. I feel like we all have a kind of “beard” which makes us different. It made so much sense to talk about difference and to normalise the “beard.” The beard is in some ways incidental because we were making a film about love.

Nadine: It is a love story where you have two people, Rosalie and Abel (Benoît Magimel) who need connection. They both must find a way to allow themselves the freedom to believe they are desirable. Abel has immense physical and mental scarring from the war.

Nadia: They are both broken. To build Rosalie as a character I searched for her. When we were doing research to find the beard, it was so hard to find something that was graceful. We needed to find her specific look to create her as a character. So, while we were settling on the makeup and costuming, I spent time thinking about who Rosalie is.

I love the fact that Rosalie is so luminous and brave and that she has a voice that comes from a deep well of empathy. She never judges anyone. She is someone who believes in people. I love that she wants to gift Abel with permission to feel desire and to feel desired. Abel had reached a point where he was just cynical, and everything was being taken from him. Rosalie’s faith in Abel is beautiful and meaningful.

I took inspiration from “Rosetta”  (Dardenne Brothers, 1999) a film I watched a lot to find something wild in the character of Rosalie. Also, David Lean’s ‘Ryan’s Daughter’ (1970) and Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) inspired me. I just wanted to understand what kind of woman Rosalie is.

I really appreciated researching the ways I could approach Rosalie, because when I arrived on the set, I was already her. I didn’t have to think about why she does what she does because with Rosalie’s “pelt” I already felt I related to her emotional state.

I have been judged for my body, and I have felt ashamed. All those issues came out of me. I didn’t have to create them.

Nadine: Is that something which came from the world of ballet and the perfection you need to maintain as a dancer?

Nadia: Since I was a young girl, I have had judgements on my physique. I’m used to it. I wasn’t the perfect person. Rosalie has the same feelings. That she’s not like other people. She is forced to conform by keeping her hair hidden. She isn’t allowed to be herself.

Dance was something that helped me too. I have an instinctual idea of how to move my body. To express myself bodily. I think you can say things, but the body will say something else.

Bodies express things. How women were expected to use their bodies and move in certain ways through history. How women moved in the 1930s or in the 1960s. Or how they were in the 19th century. How does the body exist in specific space and time? The era defines how you are supposed to act and react.

I love to feel a character through their corporeality. For example, in “Babysitter” the character of Amy is a person who doesn’t sexualise herself – everybody sexualises her, but she is free. She has a free body. I think it’s interesting to explore both freedom and repression. Feeling liberated or feeling ashamed. Because as women we are part of a continuum of conflicting ideas of femininity.

I feel like there is a part of me in each role I have done. I just worked with my ideas of body issues and adapted them to Rosalie.

Nadine: Yes, that’s interesting. Because desire and what is allowed to be seen as desirable without provoking shame is something often found in challenging the norms of a period. You have played characters from the 1930s in François Ozon’s “Mon Crime.” A young desirable actress looking for her big break with a rapacious producer, Madeline was accused of murder simply because she was young and beautiful.

You were extraordinarily funny in that film. I loved your comic timing and how you were able to beat all the men at their own game. With Rebecca Marder and Isabelle Huppert, all three of you created a feminist revolution. You’ve also been in films set in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1500s. And of course, contemporary roles.

Nadia: Cinema can make us travel in time. I find this so fascinating. Playing a character from the 1960s moving into the 1970s (“The Red Island,” 2023) and I feel how amazing it is to look at what things have changed and what is still the same. We travel in film time, and it also speaks about the world we live in now. It’s fascinating. When we see ‘Rosalie’, it is in a small village in Brittany in the 1870s and it exists in that period. But I’m someone who comes from 2024. And I am looking back at that period with my modernity. Distance in time allows us to think about now.

Like in “Mon Crime,” we can laugh about the 1930s because we have that distance. But if the events happened today, we could not really laugh. It’s just amazing to time travel through film.

Nadine: And you often do it with a feminist lens. Because you get to look at where we are standing still. There are still terrible producers who use their power over young people to get what they want. There are still women who simply disappear (such as in Dominik Moll’s film). There are still people who deliberately want to erase difference because it challenges their idea of gender identity and sexual preference.

Nadia: Difference reveals fears. For Rosalie to desire freedom and to take it defiantly is at first interesting to some of the village. But when her freedom challenges other people’s servitude there is jealousy. Pierre, Abel’s friend finds Rosalie going outside the bar and café problematic because she’s breaking the social contract they have signed as workers. Rosalie goes into nature with Jeanne (Anna Biolay) and encourages Jeanne to dream beyond her factory job.

I kept thinking about Rosalie, “What is it that she is doing to others? What does it mean to the village that she refuses to shave her beard?” Because it says to the other people that she is herself and she is able to go beyond if she wants to. So, the question they have to answer is, “Are you free to be yourself the way Rosalie is?”

Nadine: They aren’t because they are living under the weight of industrialisation and factory owner Barcelin’s (Benjamin Biolay) control of their lives through ownership of their time and their bodies. Even the fact that Abel is paying off his debts on the café is a threat. The popularity of the bar means that Barcelin has less power in the village. He can’t regulate where his workers are. He also doesn’t like what Rosalie is bringing with her curiosity.

People are attracted to Rosalie for numerous reasons, and they don’t know what that means. Children adore her. The working women of the village feel that she’s expressing something they can’t just by existing. Men find her beautiful.

Nadia: Yes, we put codes on desire. We look at Rosalie now and think, “Why is this woman not someone we can desire?” The emotions and the feelings between Abel and Rosalie come from a carnal desire they can’t control. I think it is beautiful that when she has the beard, she is the woman she has to be. When she grows her beard, she becomes more forward with her desires. She becomes active in seduction. I think it’s beautiful because it talks about the basic sensual desires women have. And it’s also about taking control of what you want in your life. She wants to choose.

Nadine: The film really is about finding that kind of love that Rosalie thinks comes from having a child who places no conditions on loving a parent because they need them. When I watched the film the first time, I was willing it to be more transgressive. Perhaps I expected that because we expect stories about humans who can be fetishised because of their differences to be about fetishism. That is the thing Rosalie stands against. I re-evaluated it the second time to be more about cultivating unconditional love between two people who understand what their scars mean.

Nadia: We need love! As a society we need love!

Nadine: We do. Nadia, I think you are extraordinary. You are a joy to watch on screen. Thank you for giving people Rosalie the character and the film.

Nadia: It’s really something important for me, because I am in France, but I would love the film to be accepted in the rest of the world. I want to go through the frontiers – so it’s really important to me that Rosalie goes to the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

It all seems so far away for me, but now I see that movies travel, perhaps I can. Au revoir and merci beaucoup!