Annas Begegnungen

My first impression on The Meetings of Anna was that Lost in Translation directed by a gloomy Wes Anderson. This is my first Akerman, so I didn't know what to expect from this. The more I think about it it feels like this is the kind of film that grows on you as time passes. The loneliness of Anna all the while everyone she meets is opening up to her although she always seeming distant was quite relatable. There are so many choices that life offers you, but you are confused and miserable so that you reject all that and yearns for something you don't know yet or something you are denying. I saw it a couple of days ago but it has a deeper impression on me now since it has been in my head for these days.

"Les Rendez-vous d'Anna" is the only film of Chantal Akerman's which I've seen. It is seemingly a highly personal film about a few days in the life of a female Belgian filmmaker who is traveling around Europe showing her latest work. There are long shots of traveling, whether by train, car or taxi, during which...well,nothing really happens. Kind of like real life. The Europe which is observed all looks the same, pretty much - sterile and dispiriting, rather like the Anna's life. Hardly a tree is seen in the whole movie and Anna actually tells her German lover that she doesn't much care for flowers - nature seems to have been blotted out. She has encounters on her travels with a sensitive, handsome German whom she rejects, a long-time friend of her mother's who wants Anna to settle down and marry her son, a German man who has travelled the world and is now decided on living in France which he declares the land of freedom, her mother in Brussels and her Parisian lover. Through all the encounters, Anna remains detached and pretty much a blank slate. She doesn't really seem to know what she is looking for, but it doesn't seem to be commitment of any kind. Clement is purposefully reserved and detached in the lead role, but the people she meets offer opportunities for several sharp well-turned performances, namely from Magali Noel, Lea Massari and Hans Zischler who is great as the rootless traveler searching for "freedom". "Anna" is an interesting, moody film but definitely not for those looking for action or entertainment. If that is your thing, avoid this film like the plague - but if you are a patient viewer who likes to be immersed in a mood and read between the lines, so to speak, this film may appeal to you.

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.

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.

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At the end of the 'French new wave' era, it seemed European directors were looking to make films more based on emotion and human interaction. This film is really a collection of stories that the viewer pieces together to understand the full story of the main character, Anna. What is wonderful is how the stories or 'meetings' are so contrasting in terms of emotion, yet all seem so natural and all are very relevant in order for us to understand just who Anna is. No doubt it is a film that requires patience, but that seems to be the very point, like Anna the viewer must be patient. It may be speckled with scenes of joy and nostalgia, but for the most part it is an alienating tale showing all to well that with success comes a price of some sort.