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Director: Chantal Akerman
Screenplay: Chantal Akerman
Cast: Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne
Dielman; Jan Decorte as Sylvain Dielman; Henri Storck as the first client;
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze as the second client; Yves Bical as the third client
Synopsis: Consisting of three days within the life of Jeanne
Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), a widowed
mother of a teenage son and housekeeper, we follow her everyday chores and
interactions, as well as her secret interest in sleeping with various men in-between.
Reaching Day Two, little mistakes begin to pile up and a sense her life is
about to unravel is felt until Day Three...
Anticipating Jeanne Dielman..., all these years, it is a legendary film. A
monumental work since premiering at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1975, as pertinent now as then. The major work of Chantal Akerman, whose career is not yet
pushed into a place where the mainstream can access her work as easily as it
should, but with the utter admiration as a director1. What was
unexpected watching the film, however, is that its aura as a three hour and
fifteen minute film which was challenging to view has lost its lustre. In the
decades past there has been the seven plus hours of Satantango (1994), Lav Diaz's
career where ten hours is a minimum length of his newest film, even a YouTube
Garfield parody called Lasagne Cat whose
epilogue is four hours and forty minutes long; not to mention Liu Jiayin's Oxhide II (2009), which is meant to be 132 minutes of her with her
parents making dumplings for a film with a thematic connection to Jeanne Dielman's long food preparing
scenes. Many other examples can be brought up which forces one to not view Jeanne Dielman... and its slow,
deliberate pace as an endurance test anymore, which is arguably for the better
in the long run. I can view it not as a challenge, but justifying its length as
a necessary slow burn, each lengthy passage of mundane activity engaging until
it builds to a quiet scream heard in the finale.
Day One is deceptive. Whilst Akerman would not expect this reaction
from the viewer, the first passage of the film is much more interesting for me
in what happens and aesthetically than what one presume. It is, in hindsight, a
deceptive lure before the severity of what happens in Jeanne Dielman's life, but I confess to have been utterly engaged
with sights of actress Seyrig doing
ordinary chores. Seventies French decor is far more colourful than one would
presume, and there is something inherently interesting for me of a long shot of
her, facing the camera at the kitchen table, preparing food2. In
fact there's a clear hypnotic nature to what takes place on Day One
immediately. Akerman uses a very
rigid style - repetition in the activities (washing, cooking, sewing) for many
minutes over three plus hours, matched by the preciseness of how the world is
depicted. Excluding scenes outside of Dielman's
home, within the house the camera is usually at medium distance and height,
head to waist with Dielman many times looking directly at the camera at tables.
The fact I found the environments colourful, and the activities appealing, is
not the usual reaction one would expect for this film, a document of a woman
trapped and confined to a domesticated hell, but that's because when Day Two
onwards begins, one becomes aware of something horrible about to happen in the
midst of the environment. When the rigid structure eventually wears down on the
viewer deliberately, the colourful household becomes mundane and lifeless, and
Dielman starts making mistakes as simple as overcooking potatoes.
In terms of a film known as much
as a format experiment, it's rewarding to know how necessary its length truly
is. Whilst a minimal narrative in plotting, these three hours plus make up
three single days in a woman's life fleshed out. The precise of Akerman's work, each move and cut to a
new camera frame (even within the same room), brings more out of the work
immensely, even at its length without sense of unnecessary excess to the ideas.
You have obvious clues to events about to transpire or flesh out our protagonist,
that Jeanne has been a widow for a long time or her interactions with her son.
The biggest surprise for me, in a film which is undeniably Seyrig's film as the lead, is how important said son, played by Jan Decorte, is in context. He is not in
most of the narrative, at school most of the length off-screen, but as the sole
person consistently interacting with his mother, the conversations are
interesting when they transition from the mundane to the serious. Frank talk of
sex among other philosophical subjects that become an unexpectedly distinct
edge to the back-story of these characters, alongside Dielman's various words on her husband and life that are pieces building
up more than that seen onscreen.
Delphine Seyrig gives an incredible performance in the centre as
well. Her prolific in abstract cinema3. Her performance emphasises
that Jeanne Dielman... is as much a
horror film as it is a drama. It does build up to a horrifying and sudden
moment, but the set up towards it is effectively the most subtle of
psychological horror as well, where the unloosening of her (through Seyrig's subtle performance) comes not
from hallucinations or real unnatural entities but her rigid behaviour becoming
unfixed and lost through increasing mistakes and moments of absent mindedness.
It fact, whilst the idea of the film as merely an endurance test should be challenged
for demeaning its profoundness, to merely call Jeanne Dielman... a "feminist masterpiece" without
actually dealing with what the film is about is an insult to it as well. That,
in spite of being a widowed woman, Dielman is still going through the motions
of a married housewife of time passed, her anecdotes evoking a post-World War
II period which feels severed, her actions a mechanical psychological survival
process which starts to ebb away. That there is so much that is left
intentionally opened is for the better, forcing a viewer to not merely expect a
conventional reading of the film but ask and consider the thoughts that would
be going through Dielman's head right into the final shot, a lengthy ten minute
epilogue of her, sat in the darkened dining room, the cute ornaments in the
background no longer seen as they were before, the agonisingly length of the
moment before credits a depressurisation, an attempt to deal with the sudden
event that came before for her.
Is Jeanne Dielman..., then, an abstract film? The issue out of Akerman's hands, that films have pushed
boundaries in length and pace further, which has undercut that aspect of the
film, but this is one of those rare,
mercurial examples of a film so naturalistic in structure that it is inherently
abstract in meaning. As I have continually reminded myself, back in 1975 the
will would've been a seismic shock to witness at Cannes or at any cinema, even
in a modern theatre having a hypnotic influence over a viewer. It emphasises
what "Cinema of the Abstract" is as a choice phrase, that abstract is
a contrast to the hegemony of conventional cinematic reality in motion images.
That, (appropriately for cinema which is
about contradictions and paradox among others), the realistic is as effecting
as the surrealistic, the disruptions of real life activity opposite from
"reality" in most cinema as jarring for many viewers of merely
conventional, mainstream cinema. Jeanne
Dielman... is inherently abstract as homogenised cinema does not include
lengthy scenes of a woman preparing food or its languid but intricate
structure, an audience used to fast cut Marvel superhero films forced to
experience the lengthy act of knitting with the same sense of effect as an
irrational moment would. As a result, it fits among such curious relatives I
have written about as, whilst not necessarily of the same ilk, they challenge
conventions as much as Jeanne Dielman,
23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles challenges the central image of the
meek, quiet housemother throughout itself.
Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Psychological/Realism
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
Personal Opinion:
One of those moments, where you
see a film of such a great reputation finally, and have to ingest and try to
comprehend what you have seen. Jeanne
Dielman... is not the "difficult" film I had been brought up with
it to be, instead necessitating its length and style into what is far more
horrifying and psychologically deeper than most horror films, envisioning
domesticity as something even a male viewer can see as soul devouring as a
result.
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1) As of 2018, alongside Jeanne Dielman... being restored, a
group called the Fondation Chantal
Akerman have been founded to assist in exhibiting and showing her
filmography. Hopefully this will also mean making the late director's catalogue
much more accessible, especially for an Englishman like myself where few of her
films (including Jeanne Dielman...)
are available.
2) So much so my father, who kept
peering in as I watched these scenes, thought I was watching a cooking
documentary.
3) Freak Orlando (1981), Last Year of Marienbad (1961), The Discreet Charm
of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Daughters of Darkness (1971), Muriel ou Le temps
d'un retour (1963), The Milky Way (1969) and Mr. Freedom (1969), enough there to give her a Hall of Fame entry
on this blog if I ever created such a segment.
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