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Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels

(Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles)

Paradise Films, 1975, Belgium | Color, 201 minutes, Drama

Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman as she cooks, cleans, and takes clients for sex.

Director: Chantal Akerman

Producers: Evelyne Paul,

Corinne Jénart

Cinematography: Babette Mangolte

Screenplay: Chantal Akerman

Starring: Delphine Seyrig

(“Jeanne Dielman”), Jan Decorte (“Sylvain Dielman”)

“I do think it’s a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. A kiss or a car crash comes higher, and I don’t think that’s accidental. It’s because these are women’s gestures that they count for so little.”

—Chantal Akerman

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels is a deceptively simple film which elevates a woman’s domestic work to the level of high drama. A character study following three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), the film invites its audience to observe her daily routine over the course of almost of three and a half hours. Jeanne cleans, run errands, visits a coffee shop, cooks dinner for her son—and, while the potatoes are boiling, she accepts afternoon clients who pay for sex.

On day one, we notice how meticulous Jeanne is about herself and her apartment. Everything has its place, and she is almost mechanical in the way she moves, adhering to a strict order in her routine. Day two starts out the same—waking her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) for breakfast; a trip to the grocery store for that night’s dinner; greeting her client at the front door and walking him to her bedroom. We don’t see what happens inside the room, but as soon as they emerge, we sense that something is wrong. Jeanne’s normally perfectly coiffed hair is slightly mussed. She forgets to turn on the light; she doesn’t replace the top of the pot where she keeps her money. And when she returns to the kitchen, Jeanne realizes she has overcooked the potatoes. She takes the pot and staggers with it from room to room, shocked and unsure what to do.

Day three doesn’t get much better for Jeanne. She drops a spoon while putting her cutlery away, messes up her cup of coffee, and can’t find the right button to sew on Sylvain’s jacket. Everything is out of alignment. As Jeanne sits in a chair, staring blankly into the distance, we feel her anxiety. Without spoiling the ending, all of this leads Jeanne to take drastic action.

This is a woman who clearly needs to be in control, perfectly played in a restrained performance by Delphine Seyrig. In later interviews, director Chantal Akerman explained that on day two, Jeanne had an orgasm with her client. That moment of loss of control was enough to form a crack in her perfect shield, making her desperate to regain her composure.

Even before its dramatic end, there is a sense of tension which builds slowly throughout Jeanne Dielman. Audiences are conditioned to watching films where many things happen. Here, Chantel Akerman shows us the unremarkable, in long takes shot on a fixed camera. There are no close-ups, no reverse angles. The camera is always positioned straight in front of the action—often from a low angle—and lingers on scenes even after the characters have exited. Chantal Akerman’s camera is never voyeuristic, never peering through a window or keyhole.

Akerman has explained that she wanted to make sure the audience always knew where she, as the director, was. This was, she said, “the only way to shoot the film—to avoid cutting the action in a hundred places, to look carefully and to be respectful. The framing was meant to respect her space, her, and her gestures within it.”

As viewers, we go through a range of emotions. At first, we can’t help but squirm uncomfortably, waiting for an edit or for something to happen. We are restless, suddenly aware of ourselves, and overcome with an instinct to reach for some kind of distraction. But if we stay the course, we find that we become absorbed in the details. We notice the color of the curtains, the pattern of the wallpaper, the coat Jeanne puts on to keep her clothes clean. It’s a mesmerizing study of time, so understated for most of the movie—so that when things do start to shift, even a fallen spoon seems disastrous.

Much time and focus is given to watching Jeanne do simple tasks such as peeling potatoes, making meatloaf, and washing dishes. Yet the part of her day when she takes clients into her bedroom is never shown. By doing this, Chantal Akerman keeps the focus on Jeanne’s daily work, making that the most important part of her instead of seeing her merely as a sexual object.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels has been called a masterpiece of feminist cinema. But the idea came to Chantel Akerman very quickly, and she wrote the script in just two weeks. “It all came very easily, of course,” she explained, “Because I had seen it all around me.” The “it” Akerman refers to could be the oppression of women; or perhaps it may be the anxiety of everyday life, that feeling we find so hard to communicate—that beneath the surface of our perfect veneer lies a deep well of melancholy, ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

Chantal Akerman knew that feeling better than most. She was born in Brussels in 1950 to a Jewish family. Her mother and grandparents had been sent to Auschwitz, and only her mother made it back. At the age of fifteen, Akerman saw Pierrot le Fou by Jean-Luc Godard and immediately decided to dedicate her life to making movies. Three years later, she began studying film at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS) but dropped out after a few months. She was eager to start making films, and her first venture was Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town). This was a thirteen-minute, black-and-white 35mm film which starred Akerman as herself. “One day, I wanted to make a film about myself,” she said. “That was Saute ma ville. I needed a camera, some film, some lights, and someone to operate the camera. I asked somebody I knew if he would help me make the film, and somebody else loaned me a camera, we bought a little film stock, and we made the film in one night. And then I edited it.” As simple as that.

The film was a precursor to Jeanne Dielman, and it followed Akerman as she went to the kitchen to perform unremarkable tasks before abruptly committing suicide at the end. The film premiered at a short film festival in 1971, and that same year Akerman moved to New York. There she met director and cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and the two became friends and collaborators. They worked together on one of Akerman’s first features, Hotel Monterey in 1972, an experimental documentary which used long takes to examine hotel corridors. Hotel Monterey was accepted to play at the Nancy Theater Festival, where it won a Jury Prize. And on that jury was the Lebanese-born French actress Delphine Seyrig, one of the icons of the French New Wave, who had worked with directors such as Alain Resnais and Luis Buñuel.

It was Seyrig’s star power which made Jeanne Dielman possible. The budget was small, and the crew was almost entirely made up of women. Chantal Akerman was just twenty-four years old at the time, working outside of any studio system, pushing the boundaries of film format and length. The movie premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim, with the New York Times calling it the “first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema,” and it has since become a cult classic.

After that success, Akerman said she felt she had to escape her own mastery and avoid repeating herself. She moved away from studying the effects of time in film and began making movies across all genres—musicals, comedies, and documentaries. Her final film was No Home Movie, released in 2015. This was a documentary featuring conversations between herself and her mother just before her mother passed away in 2014. Chantal Akerman suffered from grief and depression following her mother’s death, and was briefly hospitalized. On October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, Akerman took her own life.

Her life was short, but Chantal Akerman’s legacy lives on, with filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul citing Jeanne Dielman and Akerman as a powerful influence.

THE FEMALE GAZE

Considered a masterpiece of feminist cinema, Jeanne Dielman was released during “second-wave” feminism—a time when women staying at home doing domestic tasks had begun speaking up about their feelings of isolation. This film tapped into the sense of alienation women were feeling at the time, which are present in Jeanne’s anxiety and melancholy as a character. Jeanne Dielman has also been praised for the way it elevates a woman’s domestic work to art by using long takes and a still camera which was purposely not voyeuristic in nature. Also, Akerman chose not to show Jeanne’s other work as a prostitute, and the film does not shame her for it.

FAST FACTS

★Chantal Akerman made more than forty films during her career, filming in Belgium, eastern Europe, the US, Israel, Mexico, China, and more.

★She was a multitalented artist. In addition to her films, Akerman wrote a play, published two books, and worked in the art world creating a series of video installations.

★In the 1970s, while living in New York, Akerman was inspired by the video work of avant-garde artists such as Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol. She started to experiment with some of the techniques used by these artists, but turning her lens onto the daily life of women.