Directed by Chantal Ackerman.
How could you know? You're not a woman. Lights out?
I was recently reading about Samuel Clemens and how he came to his more well-known sobriquet of Mark Twain. It was applied to him by the steamboat captain, John Bixby, with whom he apprenticed. ‘Mark Twain’ is a river term for measuring water depth, meaning two fathoms deep (that’s twelve feet for all you landlubbers out there). Bixby taught Twain the need to read surface for indications of depth; how small perturbations might infer large submerged truths. So it is with Jeanne Dielman.
I had never heard of this film but it kept appearing in those ubiquitous “best films of all-time” lists – which of course I look at. Touted as an experimental feminist classic and coming in at three hours and twenty-one minutes running time, I was saving it for a wretched afternoon when I would have no interest in going outside. After watching this claustrophobia-inducing film, I felt a need to be out on a mountain breathing in the fresh air and taking in the long view. Or, if I couldn’t go outside, I wanted to make a mess, to have an orgasm, to drink a glass of whiskey, and dance like a fool. Jeanne Dielman’s life is order personified. The film is shot in tight spaces, so many grids, so many doors opening and closing, so many lights being turned on and turned off. So much time spent inside - indoors and inside the head, arranging and ordering. So little pleasure taken.
It is a long film, but it is completely mesmerizing. The way that such small details, presented in the context of the mundane, work to instill anxiety in the viewer is fascinating. A dropped brush, an over-cooked potato, a missing button. The meat kneading scene sent me over the edge. The pace of the film allows time for the quiet details to speak. I began to detest this woman that I felt sorry for at first. The absurdism is an acquiescent Tati, the melodrama a blanched Sirk. It is a three hour still life that slowly crumbles before your eyes. Did the potato fiasco push her over the edge? Ackerman was twenty-five when she made this film. I wonder what she thought of it as she approached the age of Jeanne Dielman?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pSNOEYSIlg