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 of 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
