Critics reviews

The repetitiveness becomes a part of the violence. As you see her do these daily tasks over and over again, you feel her need for survival and the toll of being a mother, and that frustration is all part of watching the movie.

All this is underscored by the shots’ long duration that stress repetition, purposefully bordering on tediousness. . . . Even more remarkable in their blunt commonplace setting are the dinner scenes, in which Jeanne sets the table, serves, and eats mostly in silence with her young son—the single substitute for love in the entire film—while being virtually unnoticed by him.

Akerman and Mangolte evolved the notion of the value of images most closely associated with womanhood at the time, like folding clothes, making the bed, and preparing dinner. The film establishes a tone of rhythmic stasis, letting the camera sit idly in static compositions that force the viewer to feel the passage of time and pick up on intricate details of feminine routine.

There’s a social critique here, but also the kind of creeping, pressurized dread that exists in the best horror movies. Suffice to say, Jeanne Dielman pays off in the end in a way that subverts, complicates, and explodes its art-cinema setup.

A really fascinating, almost hypnotising focus of Jeanne turning on the light whenever she enters a room and turning off the light whenever she leaves a room stays with me after those almost four hours I spent with Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece yesterday. Of course, Akerman says a lot more in this film. Yet I felt absolutely drawn to this small, ordinary action we all do every day.

To reach this level of ambiguity, the director feeds off the contradiction between narrative and rarefaction. . . . If Akerman's oeuvre is a collection of genres and registers . . . Jeanne Dielman seems to absorb and resignify this life and this love for images and for the music in images, changing cinema to come, but also the cinema that had already happened. Cinema is only one and it finds one of its most beautiful and complete reflections on Jeanne's ever-stretching loneliness.

Though it evokes experimental cinema in how it ingeniously uses a simple concept to confront the illusion of that simplicity, it's also a brilliant depiction of real life as narrative... Only the late filmmaker's second feature, JEANNE DIELMAN is almost daunting in its command of the medium—perhaps the only label that can rightfully be attached to it is "masterpiece.

Jeanne Dielman (1975) is a structural film par excellence and a desperate cry against the prison of domesticity fully deserving of its acclaim, but there is much else in this rich body of work worth exploring, from its comedy to its varied subject matter to its ideas about art and filmmaking itself.

Akerman converts the story's feminist psychology into choreographic spectacle, depicting housework, sex, and family life with a gestural and directorial precision that renders them monumental.

This topic has been covered before in many films, from Belle de Jour to the more recent Concussion. Happy homemaker by day, whore by night. But Jeanne Dielman breaks that mold, shatters it, forces us to endure the "homemaker" stuff, endlessly: each day the same, so that we watch the routine, we understand how it should go, we see her meticulous nature … and then, slowly, also mundanely, it unravels.

Simple in structure and composition, yet using that simplicity to find routes to narrative and political complexity, Jeanne Dielman stands its ground as the preeminent example of postmodern minimalist cinema.

Going to the movies is a voluntary submission to its ritual: no talking, no cell phones, no indiscreet fidgeting. Like Akerman behind the camera, we face Jeanne at eye-level. We're punished—paying attention for so long is exhausting, confining—and rewarded—it's the only way we'd be permitted into Jeanne's rituals, to the private rhythms of one woman's livelihood. We understand, intuitively, why she kills him; we understand, in our bodies, why it makes sense.