Movie #68: Released in 1975, directed by Chantal Akerman, 202 minutes. New to me!

LetterBoxd score: 3 stars

3 lenses on Jeanne Dielman

The Story

Set aside the form and think of the story the movie is telling us. Jeanne is in a routine. Objectively, her life doesn’t seem very good. A regimen of chores, with not many sources of joy to relieve them. Her relationship with her son is distant. We don’t see her socializing for long with other people.

But she is a rock. She doesn’t complain. While she doesn’t seem happy, neither does she seem sad. It’s not a movie where we’re zooming in on the texture of potatoes, each one unique, and savoring the act of peeling them. She’s just trying to get to the end of it. And that’s fine. She seems alone but not lonely. Her life is boring, but she seems fine with it.

Until, she’s not. The system breaks down. We see an accumulation of mistakes and signs of distraction. In the end, there’s a grand break; she snaps and murders the john.

What set this off?

Apparently Ackerman version is that she had an orgasm, and this shattered her stoic existence. She couldn’t handle the knowledge of how much more there was and killed. The clue here is that orgasm precedes the murder, and that she looks slightly disheveled after her second sexual encounter, and it’s only then that things start to go off the rails.

But the movie is ambiguous enough that you could maybe make other interpretations. I think you could see this as saying that her stoic facade is just a facade, and the objective truth of her situation – it’s not great – is true. Her life is so meaningless, why not be inspired by orgasm to a desparate act to wreck it all.

Or you could push an interpretation where she needs the routine to occupy her mind. Her problems on the third day stem in part from the fact that there is nothing to do. Nothing to distract her from the empty life she has.

All in all, I was surprised there was a story at all. I expected the really avante garde thing to do would be to center the quiet work that the movies ignore. Psycho sexual murder? How cliche!

The Movie

Watching this movie, I felt like I was learning how many assumptions are baked into movies, by showing us a film that does not follow those assumptions.

We watch the movie and the scenes feel wrong. We realize that most movies cut to the action and use tight shots, because we notice this movie is not doing that. We notice most movies use music to telegraph how we should feel. And that when people write letters, we should hear them say what they’re writing, either as a voiceover or as they read aloud. We notice what’s missing, and in doing so we notice many of the ways movies differ from straight audiovisual recording of an unfolding reality. The movie shows us what a film is, by showing what it is not.

But it’s not a 100% committed to this. The movie does occasionally follow normal conventions. You see this most clearly on the subsequent days, because when a routine is the same, we often see a truncated version of it. After all, this is still three days in the space of three hours.

The Time

As time goes on, the experience of watching this movie has changed.

When it premiered, the acts it depicted were familiar, but the act of putting them on screen was not. Unfamiliar things are put on the screen all the time – as Akerman famously said, a car accident or a kiss are higher on the hierarchy than the washing up. We do the washing every day, but many don’t kiss daily. Car crashes are rarer still.

But as time passes, the movie takes on increasingly anthropological interest. Increasingly, it depicts the rituals of a foreign time and place. The mind starts to think:

• Oh, that’s what 1970s Brussels looked like!
• Look at those clothes!
• What a cool folding bed!
• What a strange way to bathe – is she saving water? I guess they worried more about that then.
• No headphones, no airpods, no music, no headphones. What misery! Why doesn’t she turn on the radio? Was the radio not good back then?
• Oh that’s how you make that dish!
• Cleaning shoes, how strange. Why was it so important?
• Look at that little space heater, how does it work?
• Such a big radio!
  And so on. Over time, the movie becomes more like Nanook of the North than was originally intended.

In some ways though, perhaps this suits Akerman’s intentions after all though. She sought to raise the status of forgotten and overlooked work. And in the future, it may get even closer attention than it did when the film came out.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

Famously, this is the #1 ranked movie on the list. However, it’s important to know that the ranking is decided in this way:

• each respondent selects their picks for the ten greatest movies
• movies are ranked by how many times respondents list them in their top ten
  In other words, the fact that this one comes in at #1 is best understood as a strong consensus that the film belongs on a top ten shortlist, rather than as an assertion that there is no greater movie. 

It makes more sense to me that the movie is here on that understanding. Easier to defend it as a singular film, sort of standing in for a lot of other omissions in the history of the movies.

Next: Barry Lyndon