Je tu il elle

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Chantal Akerman had a stretch of time in the 1970's where she made her mark with fully experimental films. Some of them had a narrative, like Jeanne Dielman, and others were more like elongated postcards like News From Home or Hotel Monterrey, but they all had a distinctive mark, with long takes, obsessively long, and characters doing physical actions that are akin to ritual or just apart of a repetitive nature. I, You, She, He is a really revolutionary piece of work, though I can't say I really 'enjoyed' it exactly. It's a film that is made to provoke the audience, into discussion or just a reaction. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see this in a theater, where half the audience might get up in the first ten minutes, and the rest stayed with equal enthrallment and confusion at what they were seeing. It's also quite naked, literally at times, about a search for (sexual) identity.

Akerman plays Julie, though we're never revealed that is actually her name, and for the first half hour of this 86 minute film, she's in her room. That's it. She writes a letter, or a few letters, rewrites them, moves around furniture, eats sugar, eats more sugar, spill some sugar and spoon by spoonful puts the sugar back in the brown bag, and then gets naked and roams around the room. You might have heard the expression with an "art-house" film that it's "like watching paint dry." With this film, it's hard to exaggerate that claim enough. Shots last for minutes, and Akerman is often sitting either in obsessive detail of what she's doing, or not really doing anything at all, like in a trance, with her narration coming up dutifully explaining exactly what is happening or will happen on screen.

But if you stick with it, and being a fan of Jeanne Dielman I knew this was how Akerman likes to film in a patient poetic style, it starts to show a pattern. Julie isn't just doing nothing, but she's doing MUCH of nothing, obsessively, over and over, with the letters, the sugar, the furniture, her own body. And just when it's getting too long going, as if Akerman knows how the audience is feeling, Julie finally leaves the room. From here it becomes a two-part road trip. First she hitchhikes and is picked up by a truck driver. His scenes start slow, but at least there's more on the soundtrack (music, audio from a TV, other cars), and it leads up to an un-erotic but fascinating scene where the driver forces Julie to give a hand-job. He then gives a monologue about his wife and kids and driving while aroused. Why not? It's an amazing list of things said, and acted well enough.

The second part is the most surreal, but also the most heartfelt. Julie meets up with a Girlfriend at her place, and at first they eat. But then comes a very long scene of lovemaking. Again, do shots go on too long, or are they just right for the rhythm Akerman is reaching for? If you think the former, then probably you've already tuned out or turned off the film. For the latter, it is just about right, and by now Akerman has gone to a kind of alienating apex. It's hard to identify with Julie, but some of her concerns, like finding a place, people to love or be with, something to do worthwhile, do resonate, and the subtext is thick with ideas and methods. The approach is precisely feminist, much more so than anything else I can think of from the period, where the technique, the "performances" (vacant/naturalistic as they are), and the heart in its poetic intent speak about a woman's nature to be unsatisfied, and searching for something, a longing, a person, sex, anything. That it's Akerman herself in the role, often naked and open, is startling.