Les rendez-vous d'Anna

Les Rendezvous d'Anna opens with a shot of a train station somewhere in Germany. A woman gets off the train, and she is seen walking slowly to a phone booth, and making a call. The shot is a long one, and the woman is so far in the distance that she can barely be seen at all. This shot establishes the mood of much of the film. I have to admit that, during the first half-hour of this two-hour-plus film, I almost ejected the videocassette and gave up on it. There are many long shots of Anna with her back to the camera, standing and looking out of hotel windows, train windows, at landscapes which are at best industrial. The viewer is tempted to say "OK, I get it; get on with it!" I succumbed to that temptation more than once. If you're willing, though, as I was, to slow down, to settle in to the pace of the film, to stop expecting anything much to happen, there are many rewards for your patience here. Anna is an independent filmmaker; she's on a more-or-less continuous tour of cities to appear at cinemas with her film in an attempt to attract a larger audience. The setting of Chantal Ackerman's film is almost entirely commercial interiors: on trains, in stations, in hotels and hotel rooms. I suspect much of this mirrors Ms. Ackerman's own experience. My first response while watching was to put this film in the same category as 'Last Year at Marienbad,' or 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' great films, but bleak films. 'Anna' is a bit of a different story, though--the situation is a temporary one; Anna is a creative person out to help sell her work, not simply a symbol for existential angst. Her surroundings are bleak, but she's making sense of it as she can; during the scenes in this film where she interacts with others (two men who don't quite make it as lovers, an older woman, her estranged mother) she comes alive. She listens to people, she talks to them, she's sympathetic; she helps them as much as she can, living in a rootless world. I came away from 'Anna' with a deep sense of involvement with the character; she's still on my mind two days later. Like Anna, I sometimes feel adrift in an alien urban landscape. If you're a lover of European art film, I can recommend this film without reservation.

I try to not watch the news if I can help it; it plays out like a bad movie, and what bad movies do is they narrow the view. I want to be able to see how things move and how they come to be a certain way in their tide, not their surf. When I do watch the news, like the other week with what happened at Brussels, I'm dismayed at what a frightful place the world can be when gripped by senseless violence and anxious views.

But then unexpectedly the same night I discover a film like this that restores everything back to its original dimensions, the world becomes vast and empty again. Watching it I am reminded that sweet, alert souls are out there who quietly live and create, make sense they give back to us that negates ignorance and need, affirms the simplicity of just being.

It's not in any thing it says one way or another, it has no words of wisdom. It's in how we pass through things, how we observe the passing. It's a process of emptying out so that what remains, hopefully, is the larger, sentient view that regards itself in all these things.

A woman is taking the night train home, it's as simple as this, one of those films where 'nothing happens'. She's a director who was in Berlin to show her movie, a surrogate for Akerman herself. The whole has the intimate tone of moments that were lived through and committed to memory.

The story, what little of it there is, is only here as a way of gathering observations. It's so we can make a few stops on the way home. A man in Berlin whose wife left him and is unsure about what's next, eager to cling to her. Elsewhere she meets an acquaintance from back home who urges her to get married, that she's not getting any younger. The train pulls up at Brussels, she's reunited with her mother for one night and then she's off again.

Eventually there's a lover waiting to pick her up in Paris but even the night they share in a nondescript room offers no haven; he has to be up in a few hours to go to work, she will leave again, transient arrangements for the night. In a marvelous instance she lays naked on top of him but he begins to hurt and she has to go out in a taxi in search of a drugstore.

So 'nothing happens'; I say everything does. You could shape each encounter into its own film with its own drama, here it is all distilled to a few exchanges. The woman listens without judgment or advice, they say what's on their mind, then they part again, anxieties dispersing. She's not unaffected herself, we note, but she moves without need.

It's all simple here, simple in the Japanese Buddhist sense that recognizes the transience of things without suffering, the suffering without attachment, emptiness where not a single thing is redundant or missing. A different thing from just modern lack. Buddhism isn't about renouncing reality as often misconstrued, it's about renouncing ego and craving so that you are free to return; not about resting above suffering but resting in the middle of it.

It's all here. No elephant art for this woman, no grandiose meaning, and yet it's all here in the sketches of the transient world, the meaning all in how we see with an eye that is coming back to the beginning.

Something to meditate upon.

At the end of the 'French new wave' era, it seemed European directors were looking to make films more based on emotion and human interaction. This film is really a collection of stories that the viewer pieces together to understand the full story of the main character, Anna. What is wonderful is how the stories or 'meetings' are so contrasting in terms of emotion, yet all seem so natural and all are very relevant in order for us to understand just who Anna is. No doubt it is a film that requires patience, but that seems to be the very point, like Anna the viewer must be patient. It may be speckled with scenes of joy and nostalgia, but for the most part it is an alienating tale showing all to well that with success comes a price of some sort.

My first impression on The Meetings of Anna was that Lost in Translation directed by a gloomy Wes Anderson. This is my first Akerman, so I didn't know what to expect from this. The more I think about it it feels like this is the kind of film that grows on you as time passes. The loneliness of Anna all the while everyone she meets is opening up to her although she always seeming distant was quite relatable. There are so many choices that life offers you, but you are confused and miserable so that you reject all that and yearns for something you don't know yet or something you are denying. I saw it a couple of days ago but it has a deeper impression on me now since it has been in my head for these days.

When a single woman, in her early 30's with plain features - starting with expressionless eyes and thin lips unadorned by cosmetics, attempts to deal with people in her professional career world of film-making, in her personal world of family, and with her few, select friends, her inability to ignite a spark of spontaneity in even the most casual social encounters foreordains a shallow, isolated existence from which there can be no respite.

At no time are we given a hint as to why this young woman has become traumatized and de-sensitized to the point where her inter-personal responsiveness is mechanical and roboticized, and to where she is so emotionally-blocked she cannot even return a wave from a man who befriended her on a train trip from Cologne to Brussels, just walking out of his life as though they had not spent several hours in mutual soul-searching for a meaning in life beyond mere existence and attending to business matters. And to where, when her brief visit with her mother at a train station, and overnight in a hotel room, ends with her mother pleading with her to say "I love you," she coldly obliges, but then, instead of the natural follow-up of a shared hug, she just turns around and walks out of her mother's life for another extended period of separation.

Even given Anna's embarrassing lack of social communications skills she does have some redeeming positive qualities, starting with two of the most important attributes anyone can have and outwardly convey - honesty and integrity. This is a real person with inner contentment and the confidence to let the world in and see her as she truly is, which is consistent from the inner soul to the outer countenance, with no cosmetics and no theatrical affectations - just as earthy and unassuming as a human being can possibly be. And while she never projects in dress, speech, or manner the contemporary, overt "sensuality" to which her generation of young women routinely aspires, she seems comfortable with her ample female physical endowments in her two sexual encounters with males she dallies with, one a "ships in the night" encounter with a German man, the other with her current lover who is based in Paris, and who becomes physically ill as a result of her ascerbic verbal rejoinders, at the expense of failing to consummate their fleeting and perhaps final romantic tryst.

Because the protagonist in this film appears completely detached from societal conventions and contemporary behavioral patterns, this film elicits a pallor of honesty and in-depth psychological reflection far beyond the superficial treatment accorded most cinematic leading ladies. It takes guts to produce such a mundane subject matter film without succumbing to the temptation to over-reach and titillate the mature audience this starkly depressing material is intended for.

Well worth viewing on a repeat basis, if simply because Sigmund Freud would have had a "field day" analyzing the eccentricities of such a complex and disturbed soul as this one.

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