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Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Director: Chantal Anne Akerman
Movie review
From Time Out New York
Who wants to see an avant-garde feminist masterpiece, other than feminists and the avant-garde? You should. Chantal Akerman’s 1975 movie is still massively important, albeit shown mainly on college campuses and discussed almost exclusively among cinephiles. But don’t be spooked by the daunting length, the formalist mise-en-scène, or the fact that great chunks of screen time are devoted to potato peeling and dish washing. Jeanne Dielman is immersion cinema, a brilliant example of maximal minimalism that fuses viewer with subject so profoundly, the marathon experience transcends simple spectatorship.
Two and a half days pass in the life of a Belgian widow (Seyrig), who methodically fixes meals, cleans the house, tends to her teenage son (Decorte), goes on errands—oh, and whores herself in the afternoons. Sure, the film’s cinematic strategies, gender agenda and postwar condemnation of petite bourgeoisie forever tether it to the Me Decade. But Jeanne Dielman is far more than a political screed; its statements about the human condition, about its fears and its frailties and its veneer of convention over a cauldron of regret and self-denial, are as universal and timeless as Greek tragedy.
Jeanne Dielman plays like a slow-motion thriller. After all the stylized repetition of chores, a sudsy plate or a dropped knife is enough to chill the blood. Life is maintenance, and that maintenance is a form of both preservation and asphyxiation. It’s the menial tasks and ritual errands that shield the soul from existential crisis, but they can also form the wall that prevents emotional engagement. And Jeanne Dielman’s quiet desperation will speak volumes to every new generation—as long as they’re willing to watch.
Author: Stephen Garrett
Time Out New York Issue 695: January 22 - 28 2009
User reviews of this film
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- David Harris said...
- Posted on Sep 14 2009 08:20 Well for one I didn't find your comments "stuffy" or "conservative"; I just took that they revealed an expectation that is not a part of this film's objective. That said, I saw the film 25 years ago at the Alliance Francaise here in New York with an audience that was easily 30-40 years my senior, making them major sensior citizens. For the full 3 hours and 20 minutes they sat on hard wooden chairs totally rapt by the whole thing. Even I was astonished by their endurance levels, given their age, but it was really something to see. I also think advance reviews of any film or work of art be it said that it is "bad" or "brilliant" load the viewer with expectations, rather than allowing them to experience the work for themselves. I hardly think this an intellectualization; just a desire to make my own decisions without subjective input from "experts" who are really self appointed anyway. But this is the case with most art anyway, and gets back to my main point: that a film be evaluated on it's own merits, what it sets out to do, the social context in which it is produced and the value system it either underscores or challenges. True, we disagree on whether this film achieved this objective, but I have to say I'd watch Jeanne Dielman 50 times in a row before watching the greater majority of what is projected on screens today. Better yet, I'll just conserve my cash (so in these days) and just watch 30 second commercials. It's a lot easier and less tedious in the end.
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- John Lucas Fuller said...
- Posted on Sep 14 2009 01:04 Sure, some of the comments I made might sound stuffy and conservative if you approach them from a certain angle, but I still think there are levels of quality that can be judged from certain objective standards. And I will stand behind my statement of "that extra quality" making things endure, more than any kind of intellectualizing or rationalizations after the fact. Once the objective criticisms are stripped away, which would eventually turn our nerdy film quarrel into a stalemate anyway, subjectivity is all that's left. And really, at the end of the day, you enjoyed it and I didn't, and that's all there is. One last thing, though...I'd say my experience with this film was more like showing up to a checkers game expecting to play chess, rather than the other way around. Or, more fitting, showing up to a stand-up comedy routine knowing all the punchlines. Except the jokes weren't funny. But enough people think the film is brilliant, and if it floats their boat, great! You made good a point about expectations, really. Ultimately, for artists, what matters most in the experience of taking in other peoples' art is whether or not something useful is gained...whether or not something is learned, not whether or not the art fits into a certain category which can be uselessly compartmentalized and checked off. I'll admit that I rarely care about a film's overall "greatness" these days so much as I care about my own mind's growth. In this case, I felt as though I gained nothing. That's all.
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- David Harris said...
- Posted on Sep 13 2009 22:48 My point is that the movie is not about "mystery" or "ambiguity". If you want that, there are plenty of films out there that provide that. But that this should be th expectation of a film that has completely different aims is like showing up at a game of chess expecting to play checkers. One is bound for disappointment. Personally, I don't like terms like "avant garde masterpiece" - they're too much about marketing and finding convenient slots to describe things the filmmaker wasn't even thinking about; which is, by the way, my whole point. Secondarily, I tend not to subscribe to notions of what makes "great art"; it's another one of those conundrums that serves only to create more useless categories for those more interested in criticizing works than creating them. And what is "second rate" anyway, but a value judgment based on a predisposition ? My suggestion: next time watch Hitchcock.
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- John Lucas Fuller said...
- Posted on Sep 13 2009 19:10 The problem is, I got the point and still couldn't stand the film, because it was completely drained of any mystery or ambiguity. It seems that it only exists to illustrate that point, and that makes it a second-rate work of art at best. The greatest of art, or even art that can be called "great," must be more than the sum of its parts, which this film isn't.
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- David Harris said...
- Posted on Sep 13 2009 18:51 The two prior reviews on this page reveal a disposition that is clearly both anathema to and subject of this great film. I don't think the filmmaker sets out to be "radical" or "unconventional" or "arty". Rather, I think she seeks to make visible the gestures of the lives of millions of women whose gestures are both wholly taken for granted within their social context, and most certainly in the movies, where they are elided completely. By making visible what is always invisible, and using the theme of prostitution and a woman's sexual orgasm as the ticking time bomb against the rigid order of all that supposedly keeps life neatly in place, ends up making not just a psychological thriller far ahead of it's time but an insightful commentary on the state of many women's lives up to the turn of the 21st century. Not to say those lives no longer exist (for they surely do) but how bold to make the commonplace for once the source of strangeness an anxiety, rather than the self imposed cliches of "action" that propel so many false narratives.
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- PDG said...
- Posted on Sep 06 2009 00:31 This is a pretentious, pointless exercise in stretching a minimal idea into an agonizing, never ending waste of time. The elite of the movie critics might deem this a masterpiece, but I don't think any "regular" human being can appreciate (or even stand for that matter) 3.5 hours of somebody else's boring life in almost real time (including about 20 SLOW escalator rides). This is a film made for movie critics, not for the public - in particular definitely not for New Yorkers... I guess it's one of those movies somebody had to make, just to be original and somewhat experimental. It feels more like conceptual art than cinema - there's no story, no structure, no emotion: it's just an idea (a very small one). My advice is: let the music geeks "enjoy" it and stay away from it.
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- pat said...
- Posted on Feb 17 2009 13:11 In which theater can we see this movie???!!!
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- John Lucas Fuller said...
- Posted on Jan 27 2009 09:47 Apparently I'm the only person who thinks this film is unbearable. I have read nothing but glowing reviews of it, and for this reason I guess I was expecting something...well, I guess the word "better" somehow doesn't even apply here. First of all, I just want to say that the film has merits. Visually, it has uniform elegance and a very convincing pace. The performances of the actors are exactly what they needed to be. And, in a way, the film was everything it needed to be...to be what it was. The problem, in my mind, is that "what it was" was very pretentious and contrived. The director's agenda was so painfully transparent that I just couldn't get anything out of it. Repetition, repetition, repetition, and then the facade begins to crack. One of the problems is that, going into it, I knew what to expect. I'd read several reviews, and I already knew what the filmmaker was going for. But never in my life have I experienced such a deflating effect of knowing what to expect. It wasn't just that I knew what was going to happen. I saw one screen shot from the film before going into it and I knew exactly the way everything was going to look from start to finish. The basic premise of repetition falling apart and giving way to psychological distress was ALL THAT HAPPENED. It's really the only film I've ever seen that I feel was unnecessary to see after reading about. I was very surprised how highly esteemed and important this film is considered. I've seen a lot of films, and this one really seemed cliched, contrived, and "arty" to such an obvious degree. The fact that people love it baffles me and makes me wonder about their own abilities to "think outside the box" if seeing something like this seems so refreshing and new.
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Cast & crew
Director: Chantal Anne Akerman
Producer: Evelyne Paul, Corinne Jenart
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical full cast
Rated: NR
Duration: 201 mins
US Release: Jan 21 1976
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