Je tu il elle

Personally want to watch her 2022 BFI list topping masterpiece BUT I decided to start with her shorter debut film.

Je, Tu, Il, Elle tells a story of a woman under the verge of a nervous breakdown. She just had been broken up with. Unable to literally move, she begins a slow journey to healing. In between, she eats a pack of sugar, begin a handy relationship with a driver she'd hitchhiked with and ultimately returns to her former lover's embrace.

A very interesting film. I always hear about Akerman when I reading about top women directors. But She has always been elusive since reports about her works describe it as minimalistic, repetitive and still. Things I tend to have reservation, but this is a RESPECTED DIRECTOR in bold letters.

This film proves that acclaim.

Everything is such a choice but it works. Directing and acting in what seems to be a very introspective and highly personal work, with all the bared. Quirky yet smartly written narrative that is complimented by her marvellous camerawork,and lighting. Everything here just is in full gears. She was able to encapsulate the trapped feeling of being depressed in such a tight package without any preachiness. And for a slow cinema style, she knows when to shift gear and engage her audience.

I am very excited to watch her other works.

Overall, highly recommended.

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.

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.

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.

Not quite sure what this is supposed to be or mean. Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those who strive after meaning, allegories and new dimensions or need such things to get involved in a great film. Sadly Je, tu, il, elle did not strike me as a great film.

As a fan of long static shots I might not have had as big trouble as some others seems to have had. But the beauty of the imagery was minimal. And the lesbian love scene in contrast less grey felt not only dead but entirely inhuman and distant.

The 30 minute opening act was though it's many attempt of humor more or less dull. Her inner dialog struck me as somewhat silly rather than funny, interesting and deep. My interest grew during the second act, which is more dialog driven than the first and the last.

If anything this is a revolt against form. And I can in some sense appreciate it for this. Anything new or different will obviously create some interest and start some sparks. But Akerman did not manage to bring me in with this one.