Cannes, 1975. It was the premiere of her debut feature length film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. As the lights in the theater dimmed, twenty-five year old Chantal Akerman sat down in the back row with the star of her film, Delphine Seyrig, who is an accomplished thespian in her native France. While the 207-minute film was playing, the young director noticed there were audience members walking out of the film theater. Few were prepared for a film like this, but the diminutive girl from Belgium had created an important chapter in celluloid history that would spark debates for decades to come.
The audiences’ polarized reactions come as a stark contrast to the film’s serene and non-dramatic nature. Jeanne Dielman follows its titular widow (played by Seyrig) for three days, putting her daily activities as a housewife on the big screen. Under Akerman’s script and direction, the film is devoid of any conventional drama or story per se, but is fixated on Jeanne’s habitual routine of preparing dinner, running errands, prostituting in the afternoon and dining with her teenage son in the evening.
Her daily afternoon trick is hardly the centerpiece of the film’s attraction, since the first two days only include faceless greetings and stoic monetary transactions, both happen in front of the apartment’s door. Chantal Akerman does not go for the cheap shock. The majority of the screen time is concentrated on the detailed and uninterrupted depiction of the most common household chores. If it takes ten minutes to peel the potatoes, the film will show the whole ten minutes of peeling potatoes. Delphine Seyrig, who often debates with Akerman about the physicality and motives of her character, delivers a phenomenal performance on physical acting. As mundane as it may sound, Akerman’s vision is revelatory because there has never been a film dedicated to the work of a housewife with such realism and conviction. Akerman attributes the scenes to the fond childhood memories of watching her mother and the women in her family.
As much as Akerman appreciated a woman’s labor, she herself was no housewife in training. After watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965) at the age of 15, she discovered there is more to cinema than a linear narrative and was inspired to make movies. The eighteen-year-old aspiring filmmaker doubles as an actor in her first film, Saute ma ville (1968), in which her character causes a playful havoc in the kitchen. Akerman would later revisit the themes of domesticity in Jeanne Dielman. Bored by film school, she left for New York in 1971 where she met her future cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who introduced her to the experimental films of Michael Snow and others. The young Belgian then began to make a series of experimental shorts with Mangolte before their debut feature, Jeanne Dielman.
Feeling that she may have betrayed her experimental roots with a narrative feature in Jeanne Dielman, Akerman was actually developing a style of her own with elements from both traditional and leftfield cinema. Never driven by pretensions, the budding auteur employs the painstaking details of Jeanne’s daily rituals to gradually build up her domestic epic. Mangolte’s static camera, distant and without close-ups, is mostly set at waist-height and the repeating frames reinforce the predictability of Jeanne’s life. Day one is a rundown of her typical day. Day two seems quite as uneventful as the day before, until minor miscues at the evening hint at the potential trouble in paradise. By day three, after two hours of perfect housework, even the slightest drop of a shoe brush would alert the perceptive viewer.
Suspense continues to creep in when things continue to go wrong for Jeanne on the third day. After a series of trivial mishaps, it becomes clear that Jeanne is increasingly affected by her mysterious anxiety. The set up pays off finally at the film’s nonchalant climax— a shocking moment so brief it might very well restore the tranquility in Jeanne’s life. The lack of any explicit explanation for Jeanne’s appalling act leaves it up to the viewer to connect the dots and come up with her/his own interpretation. In an exclusive interview on the DVD, Akerman explains that Jeanne’s appointment with her second client takes more time than she has expected because she experiences her first ever orgasm and that leads to her overcooked potatoes. She then has to go buy more potatoes, hence dinner was late. Her psyche continues to be ruffled the next day and when she had her second orgasm with her third client, she finds an astounding solution to reconstruct her identity as sexless housewife.
Jeanne Dielman’s uncompromising look at a woman’s identity echoes with the tidal wave of Women’s Movement in the 60s and 70s. With her bills paid by the money she earns from turning tricks, Jeanne does not need a husband to fulfill her role as a housewife. The middle-aged widow devotes her life to being the spotless housekeeper and all-round caretaker for her son, Sylvain. When the adolescent Sylvain asks her about sex she is at a lost for words because she has little experience and interest in the subject. Up to that point, she has always defined herself based on the needs of men— her
husband, her son and her clients.
The dynamic between sexuality and female gender training has been analyzed by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) and Betty Friedan (Feminine Mystique). Yet in cinema, which was (and still is) much of a man’s playground, few filmmakers had the ability to portray women authentically on film. There were mostly two kinds of female roles— the mother and the whore— and the public was often shocked or confounded by films like Agnès Varda’s marital critique Le Bonheur because they were challenging the confines of the status quo.
Speaking of crushing the status quo, women made up about 80% of Jeanne Dielman’s crew, a rarity at the time (even today, only about 7% of American films are directed by women). Jeanne Dielman is not only a triumphant for feminist cinema, but for cinema as a whole. The film’s audacious experimentation in form is unprecedented and it rightfully belongs to be part of the film canon. Thirty some years since its premiere, Jeanne Dielman’s influence is still evident in the works of today’s filmmakers across the world. Those carefully framed, meticulously observant pictures of Fernando Eimbcke (Lake Tahoe), Jia Zhangke (Still Life) and Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light), can all be traced back to Chantal Akerman’s trailblazing debut.
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