Yo, tú, él y ella

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.

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.)

Having been interested in avant-garde cinema for about 50 years, I could see myself with my friends back in college, parsing something like this. This was the time of an eight hour film of a man sleeping. Every hour or so he would turn over or readjust his pillow. I suppose this lays a foundation for a filmmaker to eventually break from this into something with some sense. This film about a girl who spends a week eating powdered sugar, painting her apartment, and moving her mattress around probably does something for someone. She also poses in the nude, inviting voyeurism, which, I suppose we can only guess at. The other two thirds of the film, a meeting with a blue collar worker to watch a gangster movie, and a lesbian love scene, hang on for what seems like hours. Anyway, I haven't anything to contribute other than the final love scene reminded me of a film about insects, where a wasp struggles with an insect of equal size, grasps him and stings him until he is dead. There is endless convulsing, short moments of relaxation and exhaustion, and, finally, the coup de grace.

Long, slow, static shots. A girl does a couple random, pointless, inane things in a small room. Long fades to black. Bland narration. Nothing very interesting happening. It actually starts to get slightly interesting when we finally get a second character who provides some real talk. Then jumps into an incredibly long, exaggerated, and boring lesbian scene. The end.

This is just another artsy fartsy film that is fairly pointless and meaningless and vapid. It's some kind of "reflection" on sexuality, but with nothing insightful or even interesting to provide the viewer. The photography is just average. It slightly reminded me of the vastly superior film "Un homme qui dort" from the same year.

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.