"Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975)

The long title of Chantal Akerman's masterpiece seems to mimic the mechanistic monotony, as well as the considerable length, of the film. Along with Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore (1973), Jeanne Dielman is one of those subversive works of art which has permanently changed the landscape of cinema. (Both films are notably lengthy: Jeanne Dielman runs at 201 minutes, and The Mother and the Whore clocks in at 217 minutes.) The inheritors of Akerman's style -- I think for instance of Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent (1989) and, more recently, Jiayin Lu's Oxhide I and II (2005, 2009) and Giorgios Lanthimos' Dogtooth (2009) -- are many, but even if a tiny few have pursued the rigor which Akerman puts to use in Jeanne Dielman, nearly every director who has struggled to modernize their films (or render their films independent of classical narrative and standard cinema tropes) has been affected by the systematization of style that Akerman institutes in her epic work. Like The Mother and the Whore (which coincidentally may stand in as a surrogate title for Akerman's film), Jeanne Dielman ranks as one of the most depressing films I've ever seen. Delphine Seyrig, through whom the film lives and breathes, in whom it finds its aching moments of stasis and repose and exerts its motions of systemic action, controls the pacing with her every breath and gesture (or absence of gesture, absence of breath). The slightest grimace, the merest strain in her eyebrows, conveys an ocean of tangled misery and pathos. What makes this mute, unbearably passive woman compelling? We wonder, after a certain point, whether she is ever happy; and in some instances, we feel we glimpse some accidental notions of happiness in her being: when she drinks her coffee in the early morning or by herself in a cafe, when she bids her son goodbye, or when she sits down to sew and hum to the classical radio in the evening. But these moments are rare, or they are incidents of an arbitrary design in which we mistake the loosening of her terminally anxious face as an indication of a brief real pleasure.

And we have not yet mentioned her prostitution. Jeanne Dielman is a prostitute who receives her clients at home in the afternoon, while her son is away at school. She lives for her son, that is, she takes up prostitution in order to make ends meet, to support her son's life away from home, at school or with his friend(s). To the extent that she lives to support her son -- in place of her deceased husband -- she lives to serve men in general, since the irony is that she serves her male clients as a whore so that she may be "free" to serve her son as a mother (and even, also, as a stand-in wife). The feminist parable is obvious, perhaps too obvious, but the somber majesty of the film defies any reductionist undertaking: Akerman does not rely on any easy scandalizations, and in fact she laboriously dilutes any political or gender-specific overtones by dilating the quotidian real-time aspect of the scenario, in effect overwhelming any facility at theoretical trumpeting. Jeanne Dielman's excellence results from its ability to transcend an archly theoretical model on its surface through the imposition of a real-time aesthetic. We are lulled into attentiveness to Jeanne Dielman's existence -- not merely to her existence as a woman victimized by the micro-historical situation to which she is born to but to her perseverance as a human creature subjected to the automatism of her day-to-day life; that she happens to be a mother, or a prostitute, or a stay-at-home "wife", are circumstances as exponentially, as trivially, important as what her taste in coffee happens to be, what her recipes for dinner amount to, and what order the chore-routine must take so that she is satisfied in their sequencing.

The film, so much more than being merely a feminist masterpiece, is also a cinematic masterpiece -- because it is a work that systematizes cinematic events through a direct interpenetration of the materiality of time. That Jeanne Dielman is a woman caught up in the gendered space of a socially-transcribed imprisonment -- as "woman", as "mother", as "prostitute" -- is only a conveniently dramatic insertion into a larger time-skein that aims to make plain the existential fabric of a woman's desire for liberty (happiness) via method; method in and for itself. Jeanne Dielman's methodology can perhaps be called the method of kinetic collation, but also and more generally, method of focus, kinetic method. The breakdown which begins in details (the devil which is in the details) -- a client takes too long in his pleasure, the potatoes are steamed too long and burn, the post office happens to be closed, a cup of coffee tastes unusually bad, etc. -- ends in catharsis: she learns, tragically, that method is only ever methodical when it has achieved a mastery over time outside as well as inside the parameters of method, an impossibility of which Jeanne Dielman, unconscious before of her existential subjection to temporality -- which we are pained, yet privileged, to witness in the unfolding of broken patterns -- becomes gradually conscious of, becomes instantly victimized by. The client who lounges, who takes too long, must be eradicated -- not only, or necessarily, because he is a man who in his state of vacuous manhood harasses her sense of orderliness and substantiality, but because he has simply refused to live in sync with her schedule. The outside world seeps in through sex (as it does in Dogtooth) and the inside order of things slowly corrodes; things, in this way, fall apart...
...