Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Made when Chantal Akerman was a mere twenty-five, this staggering film depicts three days in the life of a single Belgian mother, played by Delphine Seyrig, as she attends to her apartment, runs errands and looks after her son. Devoting roughly an hour to each day, Akerman doesn’t reject so much as eviscerate and exhaust the conventional Hollywood three-act structure, in one of the most perfectly modulated descents into madness ever committed to film. Over the first day, and hour, Jeanne Dielman is presented as a paragon of orderliness and routine – a mistress of domestic economy, with the focus on the economy – and Akerman’s camera follows suit, observing her with a detached, procedural blankness that never strays from static mid-shots. Nothing seems amiss about Jeanne’s routine, apart from the fact that she services male clients every afternoon to help pay her bills – the only part of her life we don’t see in painstaking detail – and that’s perhaps what starts to precipitate her breakdown on the second and third days. It doesn’t seem quite right to ascribe any overarching cause, though, since this a breakdown that comes so gradually that you only start to feel that it’s started in retrospect, so subliminally and hypnotically does Akerman ingratiate you into Jeanne's daily patterns. What is clear is that, by the third day, Jeanne has started to become well and truly dissociated from her routine, which means being dissociated from her apartment. Strangely, that opens up the possibility of boredom for the first time, but also the possibility of curiosity, as she – and the audience – see all her furniture and fixtures with a new kind of clarity, and the film becomes less about watching an apartment operating itself than something closer to a conventional, realist character study. It's also at this point that Akerman also starts to deviate from a relatively narrow pool of compositions, while Seyrig’s body language almost imperceptibly slackens, loses something of its conviction and coherence, like a mechanical doll that’s gradually winding down, fighting with all its power not to become part of the furniture, tripped up by household objects that have suddenly turned hostile. Less a breakdown in slow motion than a breakdown in real motion, seen moment by moment, in all its metrically gradated minutiae, it’s one of the most visceral, unbearable films ever made, if only because Akerman films Jeanne losing control as calmly and completely as she films her eating a bowl of soup, or reading a newspaper article, with all the shock of recognition that comes from seeing actions completed and contemplated in real time.

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