Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
“How could you know? You’re not a woman.”
Presentation:
There’s a piece of “music” from composer John Cage titled 4’33”, performed live for 4 minutes and 33 seconds in complete silence. The intention is to experience the music hall in all its ambience and coughing. This avant garde bullshit is the exact type of Picasso level grifting Chantel Akerman employs in this art film. The 3 hour plus grueling ordeal follows a lonely woman doing housework, folding laundry, doing groceries, and washing dishes in oppressive real time for hours on end. There is no dramatization - we literally watch chores for 3 hours straight, so the alternative title for this film should be 3h22’41”. If you wanted to watch paint dry, you could at least glance around, but this film forces you watch a woman’s perspective in all its mundaneness for an eternity. The most interesting parts are when there is a rare moment of small talk, hopefully revealing anything resembling some form of plot. But there is none - it is at best a 3 hour social commentary designed to waste your time in order make its point.
Analysis:
Chantel Akerman reveals the purpose of this film through interviews, which I found more interesting than the actual film. In fact, I think watching the extras and director’s commentary is the only value one can get from this film. Akerman explicitly reveals that this woman's life is built around an obsessive orderliness and routine. The monotony of not speeding up or editing any of the chores is deliberate to illustrate the alienation and dissatisfaction being a traditional housewife. Well, when you portray it as miserably as this, of course it looks convincingly demeaning. The only intriguing thing that happens is when she, waits for it, drops a spoon. Dielman begins to make small mistakes, only made noticeable in relation to the insignificant routines we have been following for the first 2 hours, which causes her life of ritual to fall apart. As Akerman states, this happens after she experiences her first orgasm with the second client. She kills the third client after her orgasm because she views this change as a threat to her structured way of living, or not living, depending how you look at it. This line of commentary inevitably leads to the feminist conclusion that sexual exploration is a vessel for female empowerment, evidenced by modern OnlyFans glorification. Although this sexual liberation is technically presented as a danger in the film, the director's portrayal of housework as shackles actually implies that sexual power is positive, a key tenet of post modern feminism.
Conclusion:
This may be the only time a film has entered the Hall of Spice because I was compelled to hate on it. If you don’t value your time and enjoy film only for its intellectual quality, this could be for you. An art film just as pretentious as its title, it is incomprehensible that there are cinephiles that applaud slow experiments like these, but then again, I’m not a woman, so what would I know? This movie is only noteworthy for its feminist politics, which I suppose is a direct response to Pierrot le fou (an explicit influence) and the patriarchical chauvinism present throughout French cinema. But it is the worst kind of pretentious filmmaking - French wine tasting and art gallery snobbery designed to make you feel uneducated for possibly enjoying any form of entertainment value from other movies. Sometimes stuffy art pieces have merit, but it was over 3 hours long and at that point you might as well go watch the 8 hour film Satantango while you’re at it. The reason a film like this gets any attention is because Akerman does regrettably demonstrate filmmaking prowess through tasteful cinematography. The planimetric compositions are well framed and the only thing keeping this from being a home surveillance video. But similar to brilliant and perhaps genius artists like Jacob Collier, you can have all the talent in the world and it won’t matter if you can’t make a listenable piece that people can foremost love and enjoy.
Recommendations
“How could you know? You’re not a woman.”