Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

France, Belgium

1975

201 Min

Color

1.66:1

French

Currently 4.4/5 Stars.
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CAST Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical

SOUND Benie Deswarte, Francoise Van Thienen

Cannes (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), Berlinale (Forum)

Synopsis

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles brilliantly evokes, with meticulous detail and a sense of impending doom, the daily domestic routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her grown son, and turning the occasional trick—just as it begins to break down. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character portrait or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades, and is finally making its long-awaited DVD debut. —The Criterion Collection

Director

Chantal Akerman

Dubbed by the Village Voice as “arguably the most important European director of her generation,” Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman is known for making innovative films that have often earned comparison to those of Jean-Luc Godard or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Although she rejects the label of “feminist filmmaker,” Akerman has become a guiding light in making films about the real issues faced by women, employing an experimental, deeply personal approach to her subjects.

A disciple of Godard (who first inspired the then-15-year-old Akerman with his Pierre le fou), Akerman attended Brussels’ INSAS film school and the Universite Internationale du Paris. She demonstrated her devotion to Godard with her first amateur short subject, 1968’s Saute Ma Ville (Blow up My Town), which three years after its completion was entered in the Oberhausen Festival. Working on the fringes of show business in New York in the early ’70s, Akerman became an enthusiastic participant in the avant garde film… read more

In 1975, Akerman made her best-known and one of her most influential films, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that was barely shown in the U.S., but which generated considerable response in Europe. Filmed largely in real time, it was an over three-hour-long chronicle of mundane episodes from the daily life of a 40-year old woman who snaps when faced with intense emotion and commits a horrifying crime. This focus on activities and occurrences over traditional narrative and continuity is a typical feature of Akerman’s films (the 1972 short Hotel Monterey consists entirely of shots of people walking in and out of a rundown New York hotel). She is also known for utilizing experimental compositions of light and architectural design, with detached, non sequitur soundtracks to underscore the “action.” In 1996, Akerman made perhaps her most mainstream film to date, Un Divan a New York. A romantic comedy about an American psychoanalyst and a Parisian dancer who agree to switch apartments, it starred William Hurt and Juliette Binoche. Three years later, Akerman ventured to Jasper, Texas, where she made Sud, a documentary about the horrendous killing of James Byrd, Jr., an African-American man who was savagely murdered by three white men. The film was screened at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:79189~T1)

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Duncan Gray

9May13

The first thing you'll notice is how trapped you feel—the cozy wallpaper alone is as nightmarishly stylized as the world of Caligari, while the fixed camera makes every location feel like a box and the material objects of domesticity turn threatening. But most important is the woman inside, whose routine begins to break in subtle, thrilling, frightening ways. One of the great works of radical cinema. 5 stars.

m. noone likes this

Mai Ragab El-Refa'ey

11Feb13

Jeanne Dielman, directed by Belgian director Chantal Akerman, is a very strong "feminist" film. I think this is one of the films that you either love or hate, with no possibility of something in between. It's very repetitive and hypnotic, and that is what might lead some to be extremely bored by it. But that repetition is the charm of it, as it is almost a documentation in real time of a simple housewife. And also that repetition is what allows you to see (not necessarily understand, though) how things go wrong in her life.

Baby Rocco likes this

DUTCH

19Jan13

People were not kidding when they say it was as though the film was shot all in real time but I dare you find a better film that is also a feminist text.

Gran-Hoff

3Jan13

The different uses of time to bury, to charge, to breath, to alienate and to express; the accumulation of energy flows; the découpage that leaves us aware of the whole empty apartment all the time, intensifying Jeanne's solitude; the unbalanced frame composition/mise-en-scène (Bonitzer's deframing) which rhymes with the unbalanced disposition of actions and the unbalance between her inner and outer world; etc, etc...