Jeanne Dielman

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

You've formed some habits over years of being alone, transactions that take you, towards the gloam, characteristic of your standing, excepting afternoon transplanting, it's as rigid and as set, as a millstone. A subtle change seems to upset the fine-tuned balance, it's got you searching inwardly, looking askance, the equilibrium disturbed, there are things need to be curbed, it's got you wandering around, locked in a trance.

After 30 minutes of uncomfortable fidget I started to become tuned into the monotony of Jeanne's existence and only subsequently struggled with the final half hour, although the ending perked me up. If nothing else this film has the power to get you thinking of your insignificance and, possibly, the chance of you doing something about it.

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.

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.

I watched this film forty years after it was made, in a theater in downtown New York City that plays only art films. Still, I was impressed by the audience's rapt attention over the 3 and 1/2 hours of the film. I too was sitting fascinated the entire time. We seemed to understand that a part of the experience of watching it was familiarizing ourselves with the details of the dignified Jeanne's existence. Every piece of furniture in her apartment is viewed over and over, and her daily routine is so minutely reviewed that it is imprinted in the mind; so, any tiny deviation jumps out as a sinister departure portending -- what? You wait worriedly to find out what it could mean. Mostly you feel a great sadness for someone who is clearly desperate to make ends meet financially, so she and her child will be okay. You see a perfectionist at work as she proceeds through the day, as though the great care she is taking shining and folding and washing will somehow result in safety for her and the child. There is a spirituality in this, and it begins to take hold of you, and you fervently hope for her survival.