Sole Criterion: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
By Brett Ballard-Beach
February 2, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
For the life of me, I could not tell you when I first heard about this week’s Sole Criterion pick. It’s an embarrassing admission to have to make, especially for a film that up until a few years ago, when it was released on DVD through the Criterion Collection, was still incredibly hard to see on screens big or small, and particularly here in the United States, where the venues for foreign films decrease in number every year. I don’t think Leonard Maltin ever mentioned it in his TV and Movie Guide (back when it was called that). Perhaps Ebert made an offhand reference to it in a column of his once, but I don’t think he ever reviewed it, it hasn’t made his list of Great Movies, and doing a word search for it on his website (not comprehensive, I know), I find no mention of it.
It was, for me, a great white whale of cinema that I was finally able to encounter during my two years at NYU, on a Saturday morning, by myself (or nearly) for the duration of its 201 minutes. I “knew” the plot, knew the bandied-about cliché that it’s a film where “nothing happens," where the camera remains fixed for repeated long stretches of time (five to eight minutes generally). What I wasn’t prepared for was how built on contradictions it is, in so many ways large and small, the most basic of which is this: it is a film where the plot is so straightforward it could be summed up in a matter of sentences, but the main character remains so invigoratingly (and frustratingly) opaque that you could debate for days afterwards what it all “means."
Since that first time, I have seen it on 35mm at the private college in Portland where I worked from 2008-2010, was denied a chance to see it a third time at another college-run cinema when their 35mm projector broke the day before the print arrived, and viewed it on DVD three times, once with a friend who had listened to me expound upon it for over a decade and was grateful for the opportunity to get me to shut up about how she needed to experience it.
My list of my five favorite films includes a pair of grand epics by master directors: Stanley Kubrick’s costume drama Barry Lyndon, running 184 minutes, Sergio Leone’s gangster tragedy Once Upon a Time in America, sprawling 230 minutes in its “full-length” European version, two considerably shorter comedies that I have written about for Chapter Two - Richard Linklater’s elegiac Before Sunset and David R. Ellis’ splatstick tragicomedy Final Destination 2, running 80 minutes and 91 minutes respectively - and today's film, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 fictional epic of domesticity and inner space, made when she was only 25: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
The title is an address, a statement of fact, a fixed reference point, a jumping-off point, and in a film where every little detail of character and motivation seems up for grabs, it may be the only concrete assertion of which to be certain. Akerman’s camera follows the title character, a single mother, over a 48-hour period spread out over three midweek days (a Tuesday evening, all of Wednesday, and a Thursday morning and afternoon). She cleans, prepares meals, runs errands, watches a neighbor’s infant, dotes on her son, and for an hour each day, takes a gentleman caller into her bedroom in exchange for money. (I choose my words carefully because the film does not document what happens during the first two of the three interactions. We are left to imagine precisely what occurs).
This is not sprung on the audience as a delayed surprise - the first appointment occurs within the film’s first 10 minutes and is followed up shortly thereafter by Jeanne washing up in her tub. Both of these incidents are examples of Akerman’s subtle but intentional humor that comes from the upending of expectations. We are not expecting the sexual liaison, and the extended scene in the bathtub, though featuring the gorgeous actress Delphine Seyrig partially naked, is thoroughly, intentionally de-eroticized. It is simply another daily household task.
The confluence of both these events so early on also trains the audience, not unreasonably, to expect similar upheavals at regular intervals. Instead, there will be mounting dread coupled with moments that play out in real time, allowing the audience the freedom to live in the action at the moment, and pass through interest, unease, fatigue, boredom (yes, even that!) and back again, while aware of a claustrophobia that comes from being cooped up within the confines of Jeanne’s apartment. (When she opens her bedroom window to air out the room or the door that leads out from the kitchen to her porch, to grab a sack of potatoes, I can always feel myself yearning to feel a breeze or see the city streets just outside.) Even so, as one example of the film’s contradictory nature I alluded to earlier, the apartment itself is far from oppressive. As stifled as the lives of its two inhabitants are, Akerman doesn’t stress any emotional echoes of past wrongs that still reverberate within the walls. Some warmth still exudes and (after spending nearly three and a half hours in its dimensions) it feels like home.
Since she is alone for the majority of her day, doesn’t provide voiceover narration, and isn’t prone to outbursts of talking to herself, she remains as verbally silent as any lead character in a film has outside of Eastwood’s Man with No Name in the “Dollars” trilogy. And even when a conversation occurs she is with few exceptions on the receiving end of the dialogue. A letter from her sister (living in Canada) read aloud by Jeanne and a pair of brief exchanges with her son Sylvain leaves us with snatches of background info, but these only serve to make her more enigmatic, not less.
Akerman also penned the screenplay, and made the decision shortly before filming started to pare down extraneous subplots and scale back on the number of characters featured. To beg a comparison from the world of music, I liken it to Prince stripping the bass line out of “When Doves Cry” shortly before releasing it on Purple Rain. It’s a bold and unexpected move that renders something mysterious by making it slightly less “accessible” and gains from making the familiar less so. And it’s what Akerman makes the decision to leave in, that gives Jeanne Dielman, the movie and the character power and mystery.
We see a woman making her bed, peeling potatoes, preparing breaded veal cutlets one night, and meatloaf the next night, cleaning the scuff off her son’s shoes - the tiny moments of everyday life, the mundanity and the reality that are simply elided in most fictional (and non-fictional) narrative films because they would be too “boring” for an audience. I will be the first to admit that I can get as restless during these sequences as any, but I am always aware of the purpose towards which Akerman deploys these moments, and as I get older, I am infinitely more grateful to be able to spend a moment at rest with a film, than be subjected to, say, an action sequence constructed and cut to within an inch of its life, daring the audience member to wonder if it is worth the bother for him or her to ascertain precisely what is going on.
There is method to Akerman’s controlled structuralist “madness” (as well as begging the question as to whether or not Jeanne herself is already or is veering towards a breakdown of her faculties). While it may seem at first that a random sequence of days in one woman’s life has been chosen, the extended takes and time spent on Jeanne’s daily, rigorously controlled and planned routine, allow us to begin to see all the ways in which that system is collapsing in on itself. It calls to mind any of Kubrick’s films in which a perfectly “designed” structure (a nuclear family, the system to prevent a doomsday scenario, a trip through space, a Marine training camp) is undone from the inside, typically by human error, failing, or madness. For all the control Jeanne exerts, all the detachment she appears to exhibit, she is ultimately at the whim of her routine as much as she is its master. When the cracks appear, they quickly lead to rupture.
The initial fissures aren’t so noticeable - a verbal gaffe from Wednesday’s client on his way out, Jeanne forgetting to turn out the light in one room before making her way to the next. But they culminate in the sequence that is at the heart of Akerman’s story, very near the halfway mark, a moment as droll and ridiculous as it is terrifying and tragic. Through some unfathomable (re: ordinary and human) error, she has overcooked the potatoes for the evening’s dinner. And in Seyrig’s exquisite pantomime, we observe that Jeanne has absolutely no clue what to do next. Her reaction - carrying the pot distractedly from room to room before finally making the decision to dump the water in the sink and toss the potatoes could be sped up only slightly and played for slapstick laughs. Akerman astutely observes both the absurdity and the melancholy in Jeanne’s situation.
Akerman’s cinematographer Babette Mangolte faced several unenviable tasks in filming Jeanne Dielman, primary of which was finding a way to keep a film with close to two dozen long takes, very few cuts within individual scenes and only a handful of locations visually stimulating. I attribute whatever warm feeling I get from the apartment scenes to her skill in lighting to avoid sterility. The camera is often kept low (perhaps in deference to its director) so that in some instances there’s a subliminal feeling of Jeanne’s world closing in on or toppling over upon her.
By far the boldest decisions by Akerman and Mangolte are to have no close-ups, no reverse angle shots, and no point-of-view shots. Any one of those, even deployed sparingly, would help the audience into Jeanne’s world (and Seyrig’s process) even if just for a moment by filling the frame with her countenance or serving as a proxy so we can truly “see” what she is looking at, and by extension, gain insight into what she is thinking. Consider it anti-3D: Akerman refuses to meet the audience even halfway with the image, let alone send it shooting out over us, thereby forcing us to move ourselves closer to the image, perhaps physically, but psychically as well.
Another ironic contradiction: hiring an internationally acclaimed actress such as Seyrig, setting her in the heart of domestic drudgery (but with meticulously coiffed hair) and keeping her at a distance from the viewer for the length of the film. Seyrig does an incredible job of internalizing Jeanne’s feelings as needed, and letting us share in the maddening scenes of time creeping along that occurs in the film’s final third when Jeanne’s routine is upset yet again by rising too early, thereby throwing off her timing entirely for her regimented day. The tension that accumulates throughout the day culminates in a finale that offers different levels of release (an orgasm, an act of violence, sitting alone in a darkened living room) but the film resolutely refuses to end by explaining anything, as Akerman remains true to her heroine’s enigma-wrapped-in-a-riddle qualities.
And if there is one defining image, for me, of Seyrig as Jeanne, it is in the look on her face as Thursday’s gentleman client lies on top of her (for once, the camera enters the bedroom) and they silently have intercourse. She has an orgasm and her face and posture encapsulate the gamut of emotions: ecstasy, terror, loathing, and panic. It is possible this may be her first ever orgasm. We can see this play of emotions, but what does she really think about it? About her life? Her family? We are presented with a film’s worth of clue and left to the devices of our own interpretations.
Akerman dodged and circumvented numerous pitfalls with Jeanne Dielman, not the least of which was resisting the temptation to settle for bullying and telling the audience how to feel. Her film is feminist in spirit and production but isn’t simply a tract on the woes of a single mother. It’s experimental in the extreme, but with a star performance at its center capturing a character who, at her core, wouldn’t be out of place in a sudsy Douglas Sirk melodrama from the ‘50s. Every detail feels precise and planned (but not fussed over) yet the film’s emotional plot unravels so spectacularly it feels as if improvisation could take over and anything could happen. And at the end, I come back to the title. Her name is Jeanne Dielman, she lives in Belgium, at this particular address. Of that, at least, I can be confident.
Next time: A Beach Boy. Sweet Baby James. Miles and miles of open road. The defining film of the 1970s car culture genre. DVD Spine # 414.