Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

 

Chantal Akerman's 221-minute feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has many of the features I'd never seen before, many things that aren't normally seen, although the film is all the better for those features. We don't see life as it is lived because this is acting, but what we do see is usually not included in cinema because it would be considered extraneous, simply soul-destroyingly boring: for instance, eating really does take place. The paradox of Jeanne Dielman is that the normally boring bits are not only the most interesting parts, but that the normally most interesting parts hardly get a look-in.

This could be called experimental cinema, but that would demean this magnificent film, which is played by Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) with a lesser role by her son Syvain (Jan Decorte). Normally we might for instance see a cooking scene for a short time, unless included with a significant conversation, although there's hardly any conversation in this film anyway. What we see here are painfully drawn-out scenes of everyday matters, although they become the very fabric of the film itself: a slow scene of potatoes being peeled; water dripping through a coffee filter to a jug; washing and rinsing the dishes and cutlery after meals; slowly folding Sylvain's pyjamas and folding up his bed in the lounge; food actually being eaten in 'real time' along with drinks being served in real quantities, not a few centimetres as in most films; what little conversation there is taking time, etc. Jeanne has to keep doing things in order to make herself exist, or rather to give herself a semblance of existing.

Jeanne is meticulous in almost everything she does, and this is seen in the way she puts the cutlery away, dusts the ornaments in the glass-fronted cupboard, etc. In almost all respects, she appears to be a very presentable lower middle-class woman perhaps with minor bourgeois pretensions. Oh, and she places a towel on her bed to mop up sperm: Jeanne is a widow and has no wish to complicate her life with another man, but to make ends meet she has to prostitute herself during the afternoon when her son is at school.

Her relative has sent her a present from Canada, so Jeanne, on hearing the doorbell, hides it under the bed and puts the scissors she used to open it on the dressing table: now why should the viewer feel something coming? The john, to his misfortune, gives Jeanne an orgasm, probably for the first time ever in her life, and while he basks in post-coital bliss Jeanne uses the scissors on his neck. Well, she couldn't exactly admit to anyone, especially herself, that she'd enjoyed it could she? So what now, waiting for Sylvain to return from school to find a dead body on his mother's bed?

This is one of the best films ever made.