The Sight and Sound poll of the world’s best films had a bit of a shake-up last year when an obscure three-and-a-half-hour experimental feminist movie made it to the number one spot. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is as austere, detailed and lengthy as its title.
The film spans three days in the life of Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), a suburban Belgian housewife who is also a prostitute. She lives with her taciturn teenage son in a drab apartment whose decor exerts an almost hypnotic fascination. Jeanne’s bedroom wardrobe summons up a whole world of psychic malaise as well as anything in Lynch. It perfectly matches her existence which is a joyless round of chores punctuated by the occasional client.
Her relationship with her son is perfectly cordial though neither expresses the slightest bit of affection to the other. They hardly talk and when they do they seem to have strange conversations about sex. At one point Sylvain says “If I were a woman I couldn’t make love with someone I wasn’t deeply in love with,” to which Jeanne replies “How could you know? You’re not a woman.” Another conversation includes Sylvain saying that “a man’s penis is like a sword’. I suppose it’s always a temptation for a feminist movie to have a man compare his penis to a lethal weapon.
Huge swathes of the running time are concerned with Jeanne’s chores: we see her peeling potatoes, preparing meals, washing up, cleaning. But while a lot of the action is prosaic, there are mysteries. The living room is bathed in a flashing blue light. From a nearby neon sign? A police station? Or the foreshadowing of a terrible event? Mild spoiler: there is, in fact, a terrible event. Each night Jeanne and Sylvain go out but we don’t know where they go or what they do. One evening Sylvain asks “Can we not go tonight?”, which implies a definite destination rather than a stroll. But they end up going anyway.
The film is 50 years old and its age gives the film another level of fascination. We feel almost like time-travellers, as well as voyeurs, in that it gives the impression of another life unspooling as we watch. This is undoubtedly what life in suburban Belgium in the mid-’70s was like. The camera neutrally records the action – every shot is mid-distance without any camera movement whatsoever – which adds to the sense of verisimilitude. Jeanne Dielman is both very boring and fascinating and a film I’ll definitely watch again.
Is it a great film? I’d say yes. The greatest film of all time? Nowhere near. It’s very much an anti-film in that it uses very few of the techniques – or even grammar – of traditional film making. It’a a one-of-a-kind which earns its place in the canon but when the next Sight and Sound poll in 2032 is announced I’d be surprised if it even features in the top ten.
Jeanne Dielman can be viewed on the BFI player.
