The British Film Institute and Sight and Sound magazine recently announced the results of their decennial “Greatest Films of All Time” poll—a major event for movieheads. At the top: “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”
in a 2009 interview with Criterion. But if Jeanne Dielman did not have the looks and bearing of a movie star, the director explained, “we wouldn’t reallythe person, just as men don’t see their wives doing dishes.” Akerman intended, she said, “to give a cinematic life to all of these actions” that are typically devalued. By casting a beautiful, magnetic star in a dreary, repetitive role, Akerman makes a concession to conventional movie expectations even as she defies them.
“Jeanne Dielman” is Akerman’s tribute to her mother, to her countless hours of care, and, beneath the surface, to the religious rituals of Akerman’s Polish-Jewish family, many of whose members were murdered in the Holocaust. In the observant Jewish home of Akerman’s paternal grandfather, “every activity of the day was ritualized,” a discipline that “keeps anxiety at bay and brings a kind of peace,” Akerman told Criterion.
The experience of watching “Jeanne Dielman” is multisensory in an occasionally almost overwhelming way; sit long enough with a woman as she scours a tub and you might begin to smell the Ajax. Jeanne, ever frugal, flips the lights on and off as she enters and exits the few rooms of her cramped apartment, and, over time, this on-off routine takes on a rhythm, a musical syncopation.
In fact, one aspect of “Jeanne Dielman” that it shares in common with both comedies and horror movies—with most movies, really—is that it is ideally experienced with an audience, where individual emotional responses collide, cohere, and compound one another. The movie is occasionally quite funny, whether in Jeanne’s dry ripostes to Sylvain’s drippy monologues or in the endless scene in which Jeanne fastidiously fails to prepare herself an adequate cup of coffee.
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