Film review

  • Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chantal Akerman (1975)

    Most of the 201 minutes of the film – joint thirty-sixth in Sight and Sound‘s Best Films poll in 2012 – takes place inside Jeanne Dielman’s Brussels apartment, over the course of three consecutive days and around forty-eight hours.  Much of the description of Jeanne’s domestic routines occurs in real time.  Jeanne Dielman is hard to sit through.  It’s hard too not to sympathise with what John Coleman wrote when the picture first appeared:

    ‘… the film’s time span covers Tuesday (stew and potatoes), Wednesday (wiener schnitzel) and heady Thursday (meat loaf and Jeanne has an orgasm and kills her client with a pair of scissors). This orgasm bit is bound to strike the serious-minded as an unfortunate bow to crass commercialism …’

    – but I think it is some kind of masterpiece (and don’t believe I think that simply because I stayed the course).

    Jeanne Dielman was hailed by its admirers as a great work of feminist cinema although the writer-director Chantal Akerman, according to Wikipedia, ‘was reluctant to be seen as a feminist filmmaker, stating that “I don’t think woman’s cinema exists”.’   One of the strands most likely to be read as feminist – single mother Jeanne earns money as a prostitute in order to support herself and her teenage son Sylvain – is also one of the film’s dramatically limiting features.  We know after a few minutes how Jeanne makes a living and that her appearance of bourgeois respectability is to that extent deceptive.  This doesn’t prove to be a major flaw, however.  Because the hour of each afternoon that Jeanne spends with a paying visitor – shortly before Sylvain returns from school – is worked into a routine so detailed that (until the third client on the Thursday) it’s no more or less salient than any other element of her day.   Considering how much time the audience spends there, it might seem no great achievement on Akerman’s part to work the apartment into our heads yet the furnishings and especially the (sometimes amplified) sounds of the place – the water running in the kitchen sink, the lift going up and down the building – become compelling in their familiarity.

    Chantal Akerman appears to want to make the audience highly conscious of what they are doing in the cinema; her technique for achieving this depends considerably on including an extraordinary amount of undramatic material and unusually little dramatic incident.  If the balance between the two were more conventional you wouldn’t be so aware of yourself as a person watching a film.   It’s no surprise that Jeanne Dielman shows the dismantling of the protagonist’s modus vivendi but Akerman implicates the viewer in this process very cleverly.   Sylvain sleeps on a sofa bed, which Jeanne folds away after he’s gone to school in the morning.  Is it your imagination that makes this look to require more effort on her part on the Thursday morning than on the Wednesday morning?  Are we by this stage already primed for signs of Jeanne’s world disintegrating, so that we start to invent them?  The lengthiness and repetition of the household chores is clever also because you’re thereby convinced that this routine has been going on for years, and that what you’re now witnessing is unprecedented and seismic.  (Even though it should also be possible to believe, at least until her concluding act of violence, that Jeanne Dielman feels depressed and a sense of impending crisis on a recurring three-day cycle.)

    The chinks that begin to show – an undone button on her smock (which foreshadows a larger crisis involving buttons on the last afternoon), a bottle of milk nearly knocked over, the shops not opening on time, a piece of cutlery that falls to the floor and has to be washed and dried again – are expertly placed by Akerman, who also creates an absorbing capsule drama out of Jeanne’s elevenses on the Thursday.  An unseen neighbour (voiced by Akerman) leaves her baby with Jeanne for a few minutes around lunchtime each day.   The second time (for the audience) this happens the baby won’t stop crying; its screams are terrible – they get on your nerves as much as on Jeanne’s.  Her hair is looking a bit tousled now.  By early afternoon, when she goes for her daily visit to her usual café-bar, finds her usual seat taken by another customer, and learns that her usual waitress has gone off duty, you sympathise with her disorientation.  You feel sure that the time is out of joint.

    There are some weaknesses in Akerman’s carefully woven fabric.   The dinner table exchanges between Jeanne and Sylvain on the Tuesday and Wednesday evenings are too unvarying.  Sylvain, who never says thank you, then gets improbably talkative with his mother later in the evening about his feelings about sex.  Jan Decorte, who plays Sylvain, is completely realistic when the boy is nearly silent and expressionless.  When he finds his tongue, Decorte just seems like a wooden actor.  Also, Sylvain’s words resonate too strongly when we see Jeanne’s client in action (if that’s the word) next day.  When Jeanne, as her client rings the doorbell on the Thursday afternoon, puts down a pair of scissors that she’s been using to cut the string on a parcel, Akerman’s camera registers the action with unusual emphasis:  you know those scissors are going to come in handy for something else.   (The unfortunate third caller is played by Yves Bical, his predecessors on the earlier afternoons by Henri Storck (Tuesday) and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (Wednesday).)    Delphine Seyrig’s natural, understated elegance makes her a perfect choice to interpret Jeanne Dielman’s keeping up appearances.  Her physical transformation is remarkably gradual and Seyrig expresses almost a flair for domestic propriety.  She’s simply beautiful to watch smoothing down a bed cover or straightening a towel, preparing a piece of meat for dinner or, in what I gather is one of the film’s best-known sequences, peeling potatoes at length.

    27 February 2013

  • It’s Trad, Dad!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Lester (1962)

    It’s Trad, Dad! is the first film I remember seeing at the cinema – the Tower Cinema in New Street in York.  (The place was demolished in 1966.)   What do I remember about the visit?   I think it was a Friday afternoon, perhaps during the Whitsun or summer holidays, in 1962.  I’m pretty sure that my sister, who would have been fourteen then, took me and that one of her friends came too.  I guess I wanted to see the film because I had a thing about Helen Shapiro, whom It’s Trad, Dad! introduces to the screen.  (According to IMDB, she never acted again until the mid-1980s, when she appeared in a few episodes of a short-lived Granada television soap called Albion Market.)    The previous year was Shapiro’s annus mirabilis in terms of chart success.  After reaching number three with ‘Don’t Treat Me Like a Child’, she had number ones with both ‘You Don’t Know’ and ‘Walkin’ Back To Happiness’ in the space of a few weeks in the late summer and autumn of 1961 – and her fifteenth birthday in between.  Her last Top Ten hit, ‘Little Miss Lonely’, was the first ‘proper’ single I ever owned (as distinct from the scarlet-coloured record of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ sung by Burl Ives).  I remember that playing ‘Little Miss Lonely’ (on my sister’s record player) was offered by my parents as a desperate inducement to me to swallow a tablet, already concealed in jam, when I was ill with tonsillitis or similar – not sure if that was before or after I’d seen It’s Trad, Dad!  Just about all I recalled of the film itself was a moment when Helen Shapiro looks through a round window in the door of a recording studio and murmurs, in dazed disbelief, ‘It’s John Leyton!’   (I also have an idea that my sister, when we got home, did a scornful imitation of this highlight.)   Fifty-two years later, the golden anniversary re-release of A Hard Day’s Night has brought It’s Trad, Dad! a tiny bit of renewed publicity:  a BFI display cabinet last month included a copy of the poster for what was Richard (in those days credited as Dick) Lester’s first feature, following the short, The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, in 1960.  You can watch It’s Trad, Dad! in its entirety on YouTube but I was keen to try and get hold of a DVD and managed to buy an American version of Ring-a-Ding Rhythm, as the film was called in the US.

    I didn’t expect a work of art but wasn’t prepared for quite how primitive It’s Trad, Dad! is.  Most of it isn’t even as photographically lively as you might hope from Lester – or from the picture’s prologue, which locates the story in an anonymous English new town and sets up the tensions between the teenagers who hang out in a local coffee bar, listening to rock songs on the jukebox and watching a trad jazz programme on television, and their elders.  These comprise (a) the kids’ dully respectable parents (who are scarcely seen again) and (b) the pompous killjoy Lord Mayor (Felix Felton) and his cronies on the town council.  The Mayor has the coffee bar’s entertainment licence revoked and the jukebox and TV outlawed.  The teen leaders – Craig (Craig Douglas) and Helen (Shapiro) – plan a jazz festival to take their place.  They travel to London, to the studios of  ‘television centre’, hoping to solicit the help of leading disc jockeys of the day – Alan Freeman, David Jacobs and Pete Murray.  Neither Freeman nor Jacobs is helpful to start with but Craig and Helen work on Murray and he then gets the other two involved.  In nostalgic hindsight, these DJs are a very agreeable trio (and not only because their moral reputations remain more or less unsullied, a half-century on).  The plot of the film (the screenplay was by Milton Subotsky, who also produced) is perfunctory, to put it mildly, and, of course, completely predictable.  The story is merely the bits between the songs:  It’s Trad, Dad! is a kind of jukebox musical before the genre existed.  The DVD cover for Ring-a-Ding Rhythm describes the film as ‘A jazzed-up, mixed-up musical that’s got trad, Dad!’, and this is right enough:  Helen, Craig and the other kids appear to enjoy all the music, traditional jazz or otherwise, indiscriminately.

    What’s disappointing – perhaps the result of copyright issues – is that hardly any of the well-known performers do their best-known songs.  As well as Craig Douglas, Helen Shapiro and John Leyton, the line-up includes (to name a few) Chubby Checker, Del Shannon and Gene Vincent; the jazz is supplied by, among others, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and The Temperance Seven; but you don’t hear many of the hits these performers had already had.   (Leyton and Shapiro had minor chart success subsequently with songs they sang in It’s Trad, Dad!).  One of the most enjoyable numbers is Terry Lightfoot and His New Orleans Jazz Band doing ‘Tavern in the Town’.  It’s enjoyable partly because it’s well performed – Lightfoot’s vocal is good – but also because, with due respect to them, there’s nothing you particularly expect from the Lightfoot band, whereas you want Acker Bilk to do ‘Stranger on the Shore’ or Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen to play ‘Midnight in Moscow’.  To be fair to Helen Shapiro:  although it’s no surprise that film studios didn’t queue up to cast her in another dramatic role, it’s hard not to be impressed by her huge, effortless singing voice.   The more experienced actors include Arthur Mullard (a police chief!), Timothy Bateson (the coffee shop owner), Derek Nimmo (a snooty waiter), Frank Thornton and Ronnie Stevens (both television directors – Stevens is particularly good) and Hugh Lloyd (a truculent doorman).  I wouldn’t have guessed that the voice of the story’s narrator was Deryck Guyler’s.  The distance between what Richard Lester does here and the visual invention of A Hard Day’s Night is huge, even though the latter was made only two years later.  In even less time than that, the Beatles – who, in late 1962, began their first national tour as a supporting act on a line-up headed by Helen Shapiro – had led a revolution which turned the culture of It’s Trad, Dad!, and much of the pop music it features, into things of a somehow remote past.

    4 August 2014

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