Chantal Akerman’s, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”, is considered by many as one of the greatest movies ever made. When watching the movie, the worldwide acclaim weighed heavily on my mind. By the end of the difficult 3 and half hours of viewing, I believe I understood what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, as hard as I tried, I did not find the film captivating or interesting enough to justify 3 and a half hours of my life. So there, I can now be the brunt of the ridicule for many film snobs, just as I may have ridiculed other people for not truly appreciating highbrow movies that I love. What goes around comes around, I guess.
Akerman’s film depicts three days in the life of one Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), as she does typical routine chores, as well as working as a part-time prostitute who turns a trick once in each of those days. She is a widow and has a 15-year-old son. Due to her being a single parent with no family or social support, she turns to prostitution in order to make ends meet and has one client a day for this purpose. The movie reflects on her and her life, which shows her to have serious OCD issues that eats at her psyche until she eventually goes over the edge at the end of the film.
There are quite a lot of similarities between this movie and Polanski’s Repulsion. In Akerman’s movie, however, there is no attempt at trying to hint at or explain why she is the way she is. She is a serious, obsessive, compulsive, and clearly disturbed person. It is quite amazing to see a movie about a person like this from the 70s as OCD was not a very well-known and accepted disorder at that time. Akerman may have known a person like her title character in the movie and her portrayal of this condition is meticulous. She herself was known to have suffered from depression, so I believe the cracked mind was an important theme for her.
In the movie, Jean Dielman does the same thing every day and mostly at the same time, except each day she either does it a little bit differently or we are given more detail about her actions. I am not talking about anything very interesting, but rather mundane acts such as turning each light off like clockwork when leaving a room, polishing her sons’ shoes, and especially cooking a meal. Yes, it is true that the precise way she goes about preparing what looks like quite appetizing meals foresaw the popularity of the reality cooking shows of today. An interesting aspect of this are her actions as a prostitute. On the first day, we see her client enter the bedroom and the door closes after she follows him inside. Afterwords, she begins to finish the preparations of dinner for the arrival of her son. The 2nd day, we still do not see what is happening in the bedroom, but we see her removing a blanket/sheet that she places over the bed for the act and her smoothing out of the bed so that it looks neat and unused. On the last day, we see what is happening in the bedroom and this slow realization as to what she endures daily is a powerful setup to the movie’s conclusion.
Another interesting viewpoint to Jeanne’s weak condition is when she needs to repair her son’s coat when she notices a button missing. Instead of buying a bunch of buttons to replace all of them, she searches a number of stores anxiously looking for the exact same button to replace. Here, as within the entire film, Akerman’s camera follows her relentlessly without any explanation or narration. The whole movie is filmed like that, and I understand how many people may be impressed at a movie showing its audience the aspects of regular life that is never shown in a conventional film. I still asked myself whether that was interesting enough to cover over three hours of viewing time.
Jeanne’s son is one of the most annoying teenage characters I have ever seen. He hardly every starts a conversation and when he does, it is about sex. The fact that those conversations, slim as they are, occurred with his mother gives him a creepy perverted aura about him. Most of the time, he does not even talk and, as Jeanne appears to not have any family or friends, he is the only real human companionship she has, further adding to her depressing, seemingly controlled life. She behaves towards him more as if she is his servant or slave instead of as a mother. Other than telling him not to read at the dinner table, she treats him like some master for whom she will polish his shoes, help him put his coat on, cook dinner for, set up the dinner table, as well as clearing the table at the end of the meal. Love is lost within this cold family setting.
If I was working for the Belgian tourist office, I would not want this film to be seen. The Brussels I saw in this movie during the period Jeanne left her apartment to do errands, is gray, old and without any aesthetic beauty. The buildings are mostly square unimaginative blocks and the people when they are seen outside seem to be all running away from any human contact. The movie feels like an indictment on Belgium as a cold, heartless society.
“Jean Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”, is a three-and-a-half-hour film the takes its time showing the viewer regular mundane and boring acts of life that has as its protagonist a mentally disturbed woman who is controlled within herself, keeping all her emotions inside with an ending that shows the terrible consequences of this forced emotional reservation. While I can understand the fascination with this difficult film, I still have a hard time getting over the fact of how boring the movie actually is.
1001 Movies before you die 