Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Any work of art this preposterously boring can only be considered a failure. Yup, we're going there.

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is 201 minutes of three days in the life of its titular heroine, played intentionally blank by Delphine Seyrig. That's a run time of about three and a half hours--time Akerman spends following Seyrig's Dielman around doing errands, cooking food, watching a neighbor's baby, sitting around, doing some sex work, and caring for her young adult son. Yeah, sex work is the odd one.

The film deserves credit for depicting her sex work as a clean and unsensationalized expression of self-ownership--until of course it throws that all away in the film's stupid sex-is-death conclusion and squanders the only good will it had earned with me. Dielman's relationship with her son is wrapped up in a lot of dated Freudian BS, and rings utterly hollow to those of us living beyond the 1970s. That leaves a whole lot of boring stuff, and that stuff is a whole lot of boring.

The bulk of this film consists of a static camera watching a woman do housework. It's like the much-lauded maid scene of Umberto D, but stretched across three excruciating hours. This is presumably meant to be oppressive and disturbing, and here Akerman crucially misunderstands the effect of her art on its audience: the only possible spectatorial response, so far as I can tell, is supreme disengagement. Just as I daydream when I do housework, so does my mind wander while watching Jeanne Dielman of 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles cook the potatoes. People retreat to their thoughts when they do this stuff in real life, and they retreat when you faithfully reproduce it on screen. The film can't possibly engage me politically or emotionally as art if I'm spending the entire run time thinking about whether I get paid this Friday and what I'm going to cook for dinner.

The question is, is Akerman aware of the human proclivity toward idle thought during mundane tasks? Because this film is only oppressive and uncomfortable if it's empty, if this woman doesn't dream then this numbing boredom could have something to say. But that doesn't work: we all think all the time, we all daydream. Does Jeanne Dielman of 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles daydream? Presumably so, but the film is so damned externalized that I have no idea what she's thinking. And without her thoughts to guide me through these three and a half irretrievable hours of my one wild and precious life, I'm left with my own.

As such, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles's conclusion is spectacularly unmotivated and completely unearned. The finale is entirely unsupported by its previous action because this was, for me, a film about what type of sandwich I'll eat when I get home and what's going on this weekend. -TK 10/7/10

Fascinating, powerful, hyper-controlled, super-subtle study of woman slowly coming unglued. Uses its 3 hour+ running time to put you inside the stultifying boredom and ennui of her life, and lets you see the tiny changes in her repetitive days that are powerful and meaningful barometers of the titanic emotions going on behind her blank masque. Not easy or 'fun' to watch. By definition (and intention?) it gets slow to the point of boredom at times. (Indeed NY Times critic Vincent Canby, who loved the film, jokingly warned that watching it 'could be fatal' if one was in the wrong mood.) But everything interconnects in an amazingly thought-out way. Every bit of dialogue (of which there's almost none) leaves a clue, or at least a trace. Fascinating camera-work; almost always static images. with every cut at 90 degree angles. And again, when that rule is broken there are specific thematic and storytelling reasons. A challenging, 'difficult' film, but one not to be missed.

I can safely say that I have never seen cinema like this before! Set out over a three-day period, we see widowed mother, Jeanne Dielman, go through her daily routine, many tasks played out in real time, the camera stubbornly static, and often, moreso earlier in the film, at waist-height looking upwards, so that Jeanne's head and shoulders frequently disappear out of shot. At first, watching these actions performed in full seems a touch unnerving - this is something that many people have carried out hundreds of times, but we have never before been forced to pay attention to the monotony of daily chores in such detail. However, holding these shots for so long draws the viewer in even further, making them concentrate on every action, so that when even the smallest cracks appear in Jeanne's monotonous routine, it appears to be almost earth shattering, just as the effect this has on Jeanne is equally momentous.

The wonderful Delphine Seyrig here plays Jeanne with an astonishing subtlety and restraint, almost emotionless throughout the three hours and twenty minutes of running time, yet it remains one of the most affecting, powerful performances that I have seen in cinema.

A film that is much more interesting to read about than actually watch. Akerman takes "realism" to a new level, basically setting up a camera and observing a very lifeless, dull person for 200 minutes. That woman, played by Delphine Seyrig, is a prostitute, catering to a client a day in her depressing apartment, as well as a single mother. We study her daily rituals as we occasionally glance down at our watches (or push the call button to see how much time is left). Okay, I get it. The problem is, I got it after the first 10 minutes. I got it, really, from reading descriptions of the film. After that, the remaining 190 minutes aren't especially worth sitting through. Notice that even after 190 minutes of breaking taboos of how not to put the audience to sleep, Akerman forces the (literally) climactic sequence. I think I understand what she was going for here, but it's not especially honest given the rest of the film. It shows that even she had to resort to a cheap narrative trick to end the film. All in all, the film is little more than a gimmick. Though I could have been doing better things with my time, I am glad I finally got to see this. I wasn't really bored out of my mind – like Jeanne Dielman, I went through my own daily rituals while glancing up at the screen. Chantal Akerman did make some accurate observations about the human condition after all, even if they are fairly shallow in themselves.

To see during 3 and half hours a middle aged woman silently executing the same household works over and over again is one thing. But to realize that this tired looking single mother is virtually cut out of the rest of society and hardly has an occasion of interacting with her fellow citizen, except routinely visiting teenage son and occasional sexual partners, is completely another thing. Once we notice this obvious fact, every act of repetitive domestic task is suddenly becoming painful to contemplate, strangely too familiar for many of us to dismiss simply as monotonous and insipid. All depends on your sensibility to such an existence. Some might find it to be trivial, pretending every woman is more or less supposed to do so since the Creation. Others might spontaneously feel a deep sympathy for her, a prisoner of one's own occupation unable to cope with a deepening void left by the irreversible passage of time, with a growing sense of non-fulfillment.

Apparently, this cinematographic study of housewife's social condition was first intended to be politically engaging at its release, and rightly so, seeing the socio-cultural contexts of 70s. But categorizing it simply as a pioneer of feminist film making, one would miss more essential values this experimental work may embody. If we feel a lingering melancholy and a vague sorrow toward the secluded existence of the protagonist, her solitary acts of peeling vegetables, boiling water, or mechanically making love with men for living... it is probably not because this is a mere depiction of women's status which one hope to be improved in more egalitarian society. We find here something much more deep seated in the modern men's existence in general, namely the social condition of laborers trapped by a particular mode of occupation, gradually and ineluctably losing any clue of human communication as well as the conviction of one's own destiny, without really knowing why.