Annas Begegnungen

Les Rendezvous d'Anna opens with a shot of a train station somewhere in Germany. A woman gets off the train, and she is seen walking slowly to a phone booth, and making a call. The shot is a long one, and the woman is so far in the distance that she can barely be seen at all. This shot establishes the mood of much of the film. I have to admit that, during the first half-hour of this two-hour-plus film, I almost ejected the videocassette and gave up on it. There are many long shots of Anna with her back to the camera, standing and looking out of hotel windows, train windows, at landscapes which are at best industrial. The viewer is tempted to say "OK, I get it; get on with it!" I succumbed to that temptation more than once. If you're willing, though, as I was, to slow down, to settle in to the pace of the film, to stop expecting anything much to happen, there are many rewards for your patience here. Anna is an independent filmmaker; she's on a more-or-less continuous tour of cities to appear at cinemas with her film in an attempt to attract a larger audience. The setting of Chantal Ackerman's film is almost entirely commercial interiors: on trains, in stations, in hotels and hotel rooms. I suspect much of this mirrors Ms. Ackerman's own experience. My first response while watching was to put this film in the same category as 'Last Year at Marienbad,' or 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' great films, but bleak films. 'Anna' is a bit of a different story, though--the situation is a temporary one; Anna is a creative person out to help sell her work, not simply a symbol for existential angst. Her surroundings are bleak, but she's making sense of it as she can; during the scenes in this film where she interacts with others (two men who don't quite make it as lovers, an older woman, her estranged mother) she comes alive. She listens to people, she talks to them, she's sympathetic; she helps them as much as she can, living in a rootless world. I came away from 'Anna' with a deep sense of involvement with the character; she's still on my mind two days later. Like Anna, I sometimes feel adrift in an alien urban landscape. If you're a lover of European art film, I can recommend this film without reservation.

I try to not watch the news if I can help it; it plays out like a bad movie, and what bad movies do is they narrow the view. I want to be able to see how things move and how they come to be a certain way in their tide, not their surf. When I do watch the news, like the other week with what happened at Brussels, I'm dismayed at what a frightful place the world can be when gripped by senseless violence and anxious views.

But then unexpectedly the same night I discover a film like this that restores everything back to its original dimensions, the world becomes vast and empty again. Watching it I am reminded that sweet, alert souls are out there who quietly live and create, make sense they give back to us that negates ignorance and need, affirms the simplicity of just being.

It's not in any thing it says one way or another, it has no words of wisdom. It's in how we pass through things, how we observe the passing. It's a process of emptying out so that what remains, hopefully, is the larger, sentient view that regards itself in all these things.

A woman is taking the night train home, it's as simple as this, one of those films where 'nothing happens'. She's a director who was in Berlin to show her movie, a surrogate for Akerman herself. The whole has the intimate tone of moments that were lived through and committed to memory.

The story, what little of it there is, is only here as a way of gathering observations. It's so we can make a few stops on the way home. A man in Berlin whose wife left him and is unsure about what's next, eager to cling to her. Elsewhere she meets an acquaintance from back home who urges her to get married, that she's not getting any younger. The train pulls up at Brussels, she's reunited with her mother for one night and then she's off again.

Eventually there's a lover waiting to pick her up in Paris but even the night they share in a nondescript room offers no haven; he has to be up in a few hours to go to work, she will leave again, transient arrangements for the night. In a marvelous instance she lays naked on top of him but he begins to hurt and she has to go out in a taxi in search of a drugstore.

So 'nothing happens'; I say everything does. You could shape each encounter into its own film with its own drama, here it is all distilled to a few exchanges. The woman listens without judgment or advice, they say what's on their mind, then they part again, anxieties dispersing. She's not unaffected herself, we note, but she moves without need.

It's all simple here, simple in the Japanese Buddhist sense that recognizes the transience of things without suffering, the suffering without attachment, emptiness where not a single thing is redundant or missing. A different thing from just modern lack. Buddhism isn't about renouncing reality as often misconstrued, it's about renouncing ego and craving so that you are free to return; not about resting above suffering but resting in the middle of it.

It's all here. No elephant art for this woman, no grandiose meaning, and yet it's all here in the sketches of the transient world, the meaning all in how we see with an eye that is coming back to the beginning.

Something to meditate upon.

Les rendez-vous d'Anna (1978) was written and directed by Chantal Akerman.

Aurore Clément stars as Anna Silver, a movie director who is traveling through Europe to promote the opening of her latest film.

First, we have to establish the fact that Clément is tall and elegant, and looks like a model. There's no rule that movie directors can't be attractive, so that works in the film.

However, directors tend to make things happen. They are forceful, because they have to be. This is doubly true for women directors. Anna Silver is aloof, distant, and appears to drift from one city to the next without connecting with anyone else.

Second, Chantal Akerman has her own style, and either you accept it or you don't. The trip by train from Cologne to Brussels is 3 1/2 hours long. Anna is bored, and we're bored during the trip. Akerman doesn't care--she shows us the train trip for a long time.

At one point Anna has to leave her hotel in Paris to find an all-night pharmacy. It's not a true emergency--she just needs some medication for a friend. Any other director would show the protagonist leaving the hotel, entering and leaving the pharmacy, and returning to the hotel. Not Akerman. We follow the taxi driving through the dark wet streets of Paris for at least ten minutes. Then Anna gets the medication and goes back to the hotel.

I respect Akerman as a director, and enjoy watching her movies. However, I have to admit that her filmmaking is an acquired taste.

This movie worked well on the small screen. It came as part of Criterion series 19--Chantal Akerman in the Seventies.

The film has a solid IMDb rating of 7.4. I agreed, and rated it 7.

P.S. Look for the Italian actor Lea Masari in a small supporting role as Anna's mother. Masari was only 45 when she played the role. She looked more like Anna's sister.

Long, unmoving, precise and artistic shots; substantial quiet, and no music; dialogue ranging from unnaturally verbose and explanatory or direct to mundanely matter-of-fact and plainspoken; scene writing that joins the dialogue in being curiously dry and detached, at once personal and detached; performances as low-key as the overall tone is subdued: this is definitely a Chantal Akerman picture. Certainly she's not the only filmmaker to have employed such a style, and indeed at various points one recognizes tinges of comparable styles of other filmmakers. Yet as if her celebrated 'Jeanne Dielman' in 1975 hadn't cemented her panache for minimalist but masterful movie-making, and her penchant for hushed, idiosyncratically understated storytelling, this 1978 feature aptly accentuates these notions while trying a few slightly different ideas. For all this, I can understand how the title won't appeal to all comers, above all since on the surface there is very little happening over these two hours. Yet if one watches and listens attentively, as with Akerman's other works there are substantial, substantive depths that become more evident and more flavorful over time. 'Les rendez-vous d'Anna' is perhaps an acquired taste, but for those ready and willing to actively engage, it's a softly striking, rewarding viewing experience that's well worth exploring.

Akerman is a filmmaker whose tremendous skill and success lies in her absolute grasp of and proficiency in subtlety. All those outward qualities, that to the uninitiated or unprepared may come off as awkward or lacking, are part and parcel of a grand if decidedly underhanded vision. Thoughts broached in the dialogue - specifically as to personal relationships or musings on Europe in the aftermath of World War II - are obliquely echoed and amplified in the fundamental construction of the movie; for Akerman storytelling and film-making are emphatically one and the same, and that is proven again here just as surely as it was three years prior. Themes of loneliness, isolation, dispassionate malaise, and social and psychological struggles with communication, and a broad sense of undefinable hardship, are reflected in how characters are arranged in a scene, and where they face, especially as they talk to each other or touch; the camera may pointedly center only a single character for most if not all of a conversation, even when their scene partner is speaking. The themes are reflected in the transient nature of scenes, and the limited time that characters have on-screen with protagonist Anna; in passing sights of largely empty settings; in the almost completely static, stationary cinematography, that subsequently evokes a feeling of disconnected solitude. Even the relative noiselessness, and the restrained acting, lend to airs of separation, and being apart, and intangible distance. All this, to say nothing of the particulars of the writing in every regard.

And despite the overarching tenor, let there be no doubt that 'Les rendez-vous d'Anna' is superbly crafted, with capability, care, and passion belying all that the title portends. "Excellence" is the word of the day across the board when it comes to filming locations, production design and art direction, costume design, hair and makeup, and sound design. Muted as Jean Penzer's photography is, it's deftly calculated and smartly executed; Francine Sandberg's editing comes off as comparatively relaxed, yet is obviously characterized by no less intelligence. Even with the feature's tack being what it is, the abilities of the cast unquestionably shine through with admirable, controlled nuance and range, impressing all the more for consideration of that self-discipline. Naturally star Aurore Clément stands out most as protagonist Anna, but those in supporting parts are just as terrific, not least Lea Massari and Jean-Pierre Cassel.; what the actors are able to achieve under these conditions is kind of incredible. Above all, Akelman's gentle but meticulous direction and her wonderfully sharp writing are both frankly outstanding, a stupendous delight as a viewer both for how much significant thought was poured into them individually, and for the complexity with which they are interconnected. Not to again draw comparison, but as with 'Jeanne Dielman,' Akerman shows such a mind for shot composition and intricacy in conjuring and realizing scenes that it almost feels as though she had mapped out the entirety of the runtime down to the second.

Once more, I totally get how this won't sit well with all audiences. Akerman operates with such a majorly delicate hand in every capacity that one must most assuredly be receptive to such fare or else the entirety will come across as a whole lot of nothing. For those who are willing to put in a bit of work themselves to get the most out of movies, however, the profit to be had here is exceptional. 'Les rendez-vous d'Anna' is rich, absorbing, satisfying, rewarding - and maybe even a tad haunting in the ideas at play. Though best suggested for what is no doubt a relatively niche audience, as far as I'm concerned this earns a very high, hearty recommendation, and it's well worth seeking out if one has the chance. Well done!

When a single woman, in her early 30's with plain features - starting with expressionless eyes and thin lips unadorned by cosmetics, attempts to deal with people in her professional career world of film-making, in her personal world of family, and with her few, select friends, her inability to ignite a spark of spontaneity in even the most casual social encounters foreordains a shallow, isolated existence from which there can be no respite.

At no time are we given a hint as to why this young woman has become traumatized and de-sensitized to the point where her inter-personal responsiveness is mechanical and roboticized, and to where she is so emotionally-blocked she cannot even return a wave from a man who befriended her on a train trip from Cologne to Brussels, just walking out of his life as though they had not spent several hours in mutual soul-searching for a meaning in life beyond mere existence and attending to business matters. And to where, when her brief visit with her mother at a train station, and overnight in a hotel room, ends with her mother pleading with her to say "I love you," she coldly obliges, but then, instead of the natural follow-up of a shared hug, she just turns around and walks out of her mother's life for another extended period of separation.

Even given Anna's embarrassing lack of social communications skills she does have some redeeming positive qualities, starting with two of the most important attributes anyone can have and outwardly convey - honesty and integrity. This is a real person with inner contentment and the confidence to let the world in and see her as she truly is, which is consistent from the inner soul to the outer countenance, with no cosmetics and no theatrical affectations - just as earthy and unassuming as a human being can possibly be. And while she never projects in dress, speech, or manner the contemporary, overt "sensuality" to which her generation of young women routinely aspires, she seems comfortable with her ample female physical endowments in her two sexual encounters with males she dallies with, one a "ships in the night" encounter with a German man, the other with her current lover who is based in Paris, and who becomes physically ill as a result of her ascerbic verbal rejoinders, at the expense of failing to consummate their fleeting and perhaps final romantic tryst.

Because the protagonist in this film appears completely detached from societal conventions and contemporary behavioral patterns, this film elicits a pallor of honesty and in-depth psychological reflection far beyond the superficial treatment accorded most cinematic leading ladies. It takes guts to produce such a mundane subject matter film without succumbing to the temptation to over-reach and titillate the mature audience this starkly depressing material is intended for.

Well worth viewing on a repeat basis, if simply because Sigmund Freud would have had a "field day" analyzing the eccentricities of such a complex and disturbed soul as this one.

********