Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #6
Placement On Sight & Sound 50 Best Movies List: #35 (Tied with Psycho, Satantango and Metropolis)

Part of the reason why I wanted to go through all 50 films on Sight & Sounds 50 Best Movies list was because I wanted to get a better grasp on world cinema and the various filmmakers behind some of the most acclaimed motion pictures of all-time. I may be a proud film geek, but there are too many blind spots in my cinema knowledge to count and getting through this list would be a great way to do just that. Plus, it would expose me to all kinds of movies made in a style that I was completely unfamiliar with, which, of course, is a way to segue into my newest review in this series, which covers the 1975 motion picture Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

I’m sure even director Chantal Akerman would agree that describing Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to a friend would make the film sound like some kind of parody of artsy foreign fare that film geeks go gaga for. It’s a 201 minute long French/Belgium movie that’s solely about following three days in the humdrum life of a single mother named Jeanne Dielman. Her exploits in the trio of days that we follow her around include slicing potatoes, going to some local shops and occasionally meeting men and ding sexual acts in exchange for money. Like I said, in describing it it sounds like something quite puzzling.

Naturalism is very much the name of the game for Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film so subdued in its depiction of its everyday characters lives it makes the movies of Noah Baumbach look like they’re as stylized and heightened as the works of Robert Rodriguez. All of this restraint seems to be creating a movie that dares its audience to try and interpret a deeper meaning into every action going on on-screen….only for the rug to get pulled out from under us when we realize the whole point of the film is to show how little is actually going on with Jeanne Dielman and her everyday activities. She is defined by her roles as a single mother and a widow and an object that you can have sex with, there isn’t any other facet to her personality and the people surrounding her aren’t particularly concerned with helping her add layers to her life.

Her sister writes letters only talking about how she needs to get a man, the men she sleeps with for money barely look her in the eye and her son spends their time together reading books endlessly. People turn to her for only favors or to remind her how she’s falling down in fulfilling the roles society tends to toss women into regardless of whether they actually want to live their lives in those roles or not. It didn’t hit me that this seems to be the underlying message of the entire motion picture until a scene towards the end of the movie where we see Jeanne Dielman just sitting down, doing nothing.

Here, she’s not reading a magazine tied to her interests or doing some other task that can be tied directly to her desires. Instead, she’s sitting with a vacant look on her face doing nothing, as if she’s a corpse just waiting to be into a casket. All of this intentional lack of personality in this human being silently mounts for the entire movie as we follow her around mechanically going through fulfilling the obligations of other people until she finally does a course of action of her own desire in the surprising and shocking final scene of Jeanne Dielman, which concludes things on a somber note that suggests Dielman finally broke free of the bonds her friends and society put her in, but at no small cost to her own livelihood.

It’s a fascinating idea to toy with that’s strengthened by the camerawork of the entire motion picture, which creates a sense of intimacy that fits perfectly with this unique way of telling a story. Throughout Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the camera is always situated in a way that replicates a human beings eye-line if they were standing or sitting in the same room as Jeanne Dielman. Certain types of shots like low-angle shots or crane shots that don’t quite correlate to how human beings actually view things are eschewed in favor of lingering long takes that are positioned in a way to evoke the experience of one being at Jeanne’s kitchen table and watching her try to create some kind of liquid concoction.

There’s certainly moments in Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles where its slower naturalism approach had me more puzzled than enthralled (like in repeatedly showing Jeanne going up the elevator to her apartment in these super long takes), but once it was finished, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how this was a mighty impressive effort whose unique nature turns out to be the perfect method to examine a human being whose emptiness is subdued on the outside but one can very much feel how emptiness has claimed the psyche of Jeanne Dielman. Her inner pain turns out to be director Chantal Akerman’s gain as it allows this filmmaker to turn out quite the thoughtful movie like no other.