Yo, tú, él y ella

Some use film-making as a tool to reflect themselves and search their identities. With her first important feature, Je, tu, il, elle, Chantal Akerman relays this tradition, which has been established and inherited mostly by generations of female filmmakers, from Maya Deren to Rose Troche and Jennie Livingston. Like Deren, Akerman combines a traditional narrative and surrealistic ingredients, but Akerman's surrealism is more true-to-life than Deren's, as seen in a sugar-only diet of "Je" or a wrestling-like foreplay between "Je" and "Elle." Painfully naked honesty in these scenes shows how seriously Akerman is in need of examining her identity and sexuality.

(The surface of the film extremely resembles Stranger Than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch, completed in 1983; the two films share the three-episode plot and the B/W medium shots by the fixed camera without panning/tilting/dollying. But this may be irrelevant for viewing this Akerman film.)

The first part I could "see" what was going on, and I can get into video still frames of sort. These fade-outs were slow in a way that was awkward, then felt deliberate and meaningful and restful, then felt flatly back into awkward before scene cutout.

The second third of the movie was good. Still scenescapes, but less of a bathtub story, and some character development for both. The dialogue/monologue was good. The sexuality of it was awkward and one sided-very meaningful for this portion of the story. All three stars are for this part.

The last third was meh. There wasn't a spark between them, only for mischievousness. As a lesbian, I'm also confused by the extended sex scene. I think human intimacy can be beautiful, but here we see...loving wrestling? I think they were trying to allude to tribbing. It failed.

Four pronouns, three parts, two types of narration (the one we hear and the one we see) in a single provocatively minimalist film.

The first-person narration we hear would be the Je, the images of Je that we see in response to the narration would be the Tu. Il and Elle would be the two sexual relationships that Je maintains in the second and third parts of the film.

The first part shows an interest in confronting two modes of narration, auditory and visual, exposing curious discrepancies. Akerman seems as if she wants to show the inherent discrepancies between the subjectivity and the needs of recited verbalization and those of cinematic visual narration.

There is a sense of necessity, of complete justification in the minimalist artistic approach adopted, totally in agreement with the content. And the innovative and experimental nature is beyond doubt.

Another thing is whether these contents convince us or not. The truth is that it is enormously difficult to interpret what we are seeing, or the implications that the director wants to assign to them.

For example, in that first part, we do not understand the behavior of the protagonist (Je, and even more Tu), and there does not seem to be an attempt to justify it in any way (depression, existential crisis or any of those things). She is simply a young woman who seems idle and bored and who at some point casts an intelligent and knowing look at the camera. Like the rest of the characters that will appear, she does not earn our sympathy nor does she intend to, rather she seems to convey a proud superficiality that makes us uncomfortable. The girl tells us that she has not left her room for almost a month, feeding exclusively on sugar, but misteriously maintaining her full physical condition. We see her nonchalantly writing some letters while she puts the spoon full of sugar in her mouth again and again. The most we can say is that Chantal Akerman has no idea what it is to paint a flat, or the nutritional needs of a person. At a certain moment it snows (by the way, Akerman doesn't pay much attention to these technical aspects...), but the girl walks around the room naked without the slightest shivering.

The second part begins with the girl who finally decides to leave home to visit a girlfriend. While hitchhiking, she is picked up by a truck driver with whom she begins to become sexually intimate, although there is hardly the slightest conversation between them. We see them eat together in a restaurant while watching television, or have a beer without starting any conversation. But in any case, the young woman feels attracted to the boy enough to masturbate him and then listen to his confidences regarding his family relationships and his increasingly uncomfortable sexual obsessions.

The third part begins when the girl arrives at her destination, her friend's house. Once again the meeting turns out to be cold and the behavior of the two young women capricious. If there are tensions between them, they seem as emotionally superficial as their desires, and entirely physical. Little by little they dedicate themselves to a silent mutual seduction, and (as we think should usually happen to them), after the apparent initial irritation, they smooth things over and end up sleeping together. The sex scene is a mixture of Greco-Latin wrestling, display of sexual positions and artistic recreations of unknown ancient marble groups in motion.

As insubstantial as in everything else, the next morning, the young woman gets out of bed and abandons her friend without even the slightest comment, we understand that to spend another month eating sugar in her room.

An inmensely interesting film, disruptive in showing the artistic posibilities of radical minimalism in plot and style, experimental in its rhythm and innovative in some of its themes, to show us an attitude towards life that does not seem to go beyond a very basic and inconsequential hedonism.

The young director seems here to be playfully in accordance with this attitude towards life.

I have to be honest, this was a damn tedious film. It may have been trying to communicate depression, the banality of real, unromanticized sex, or the banality of existence in general. It may have been trying to communicate a progression from loneliness, to meaningless sex with a man, to true passion with another woman. I don't know, but regardless, it does so in such a sterile, painfully slow way that it was tough for me to stay interested after the first 15 minutes, and it never got better. I'm all for the groundbreaking nature of putting a long lesbian sex scene on the screen in 1974 (especially the way it was shot), but mostly I just felt bored and manipulated by pretentiousness. Maybe this would have worked for me as a 15 minute short, but as it is, it was a real chore to finish.

Released in 1974 this experimental Belgian feature film from filmmaker Chantal Anne Akerman was shot in black and white and has 3 parts to it of approximately half an hour each. In the first segment a woman named Julie(Akerman) narrates her activities in a room over a number of days, as she paints and rearranges furniture in the room, moves her mattress around, writes letters, eats bags of sugar, and lounges naked on her mattress, as ambient sounds drift into the room from outside. We're not sure what we are watching here, with the narration sometimes being a little out of sync with the images, but in this little enclosed world many ideas spring to mind, including the boredom, isolation and entrapment of domestic chores and housework, something about the creative process (and ritual) of writing, the idea of mental health, drugs, and voyeurism. After 'being there's for a number of days, in the film's second segment Julie hitches a lift from a lorry driver(Niels Arestrup), stops at roadside cafes, gives the odd hand job, and has to listen to the lorry driver's life story in a long monologue. In segment three Julie visits her friend(Claire Wauthion) and makes love with her in a 12 minute long scene, with the two naked bodies often looking like they're wrestling with each other, before the climax, where her friend goes down on Julie. With her trademark still camera this film seems to say something about the director's relationship with men, women, the creative process, us the viewer(male and female), and herself.