Previously published on Goatdog’s Movies, goatdog.com, December 4, 2004

Most of the 201 minutes of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles are taken up with the camera observing the protagonist, Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), meticulously doing household chores. That’s nearly three and a half hours of real-time housecleaning, washing dishes, preparing food, cleaning the bathroom, making the bed. Given that the 1976 film has the reputation of being a feminist classic, one might suspect that the point of the long stretches of real-time cleaning is, most likely, to underline the alienated nature of household labor. To remind us, at great length, how incredibly boring it is. But as Jeanne Dielman is no ordinary housewife, Akerman’s film is much more than a painstaking depiction of housework. It provides a commentary not only on women’s lives but also on film and its capabilities and fictions. And in its observation of details it gives them a kind of monumentality.

Jeanne Dielman offers a fantastic riposte to New Wave male films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie, in which a young woman leaves her boyfriend and becomes a prostitute in a self-destructive quest to “live her own life.” Dielman, too, is a sex worker as well as a wife and mother. But the viewer isn’t given the same kind of access to her face and body that Godard’s camera lets us have; it doesn’t infantilize her. Akerman’s static, frontal camera translates the rigidity of Jeanne’s life. It is a rigidly regimented one: the diamond wallpaper, the floor tiles, much of the furniture echo one another, surrounding her with an oppressive grid. Jeanne’s time, too, is carefully parceled out: we learn that each day of the week she makes a different, but preordained, meal for dinner, and each day of the week she has a different customer. When she overcooks the potatoes on the second day, she can’t save them by mashing them because that’s another night’s dinner.

Perhaps more importantly, the static camera, long takes, and paucity of close-ups prevent us from getting our expected point-of-view insight into the character’s interiority. The film’s cuts don’t conform to our expectations of continuity; we are also constantly plunged into blackness when Jeanne turns the light off each time she leaves the room. This may be explained as a measure of economy, but it continually obscures our view, traps us in the space of the darkened room as Dielman moves on. We are as stuck as she is, and we don’t get access to how she feels about it.

It’s only in Jeanne’s weird conversations with her son that any of her personal history is revealed. At first she didn’t want to marry his father, she says, because she wanted to have her own life. She also wanted a baby, though it’s not entirely clear whether this is the reason why she finally did get married.

Does she have her own life? The film suggests that the way Jeanne has found to live “her own life” is not to rebel in a dramatic fashion, but to rearrange, in subtly perverse ways, all the puzzle pieces of conventional bourgeois femininity. She takes care of a baby—but it is not hers (rather, it belongs to a talkative neighbor who’s never seen but whose voice is that of the director). She has sex—but with men who are not her husband. They pay her for it. (Here Akerman may be following French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, who argues that prostitution simply literalizes an economic exchange that lies at the heart of bourgeois heterosexual marriage anyway.) And she has a kind of marital domestic life with her nearly grown son. Marital, that is, in an unflattering way. They hardly talk; when they do the conversation is stilted and uncomfortable. She cooks his meals (always serving him the lion’s share of the food), shines his shoes, and makes his bed. If we view the pieces of her life from this perspective—that is, if we see this as a funhouse mirror picture of conventional bourgeois marriage—the surprise ending of the film might take on a greater political significance.

The film cannot help but produce a constant series of narrative expectations that it then proceeds to foil. The repetition of all the details of a humdrum day calls up expectations and forces us to be aware of them as we watch. When Jeanne takes the old-fashioned elevator up to her apartment, and we see it happening in real time, we expect her to be attacked, because this is the way these elevators are nearly universally used in Hollywood films. When she temporarily leaves the lid off the dish in which she keeps her money, we think something terrible is going to happen—she’s going to be found out.

In fact, the environment and the way she interacts with it physically are our only access into her state of mind, and it’s an imperfect access—are we reading too much in? The title, which simply consists of Jeanne’s name and address, suggests both bureaucratic information-gathering and a call-girl’s business card. But it also implies an equation of Jeanne with her environment, with the apartment and its furniture and the various items in it, the food in the refrigerator. We somehow know that Jeanne has been nearly undone by having overcooked the potatoes, or by having put spoiled milk in her coffee. The first day, Jeanne scrubs herself almost obsessively after her customer’s departure; the second day we see her scrubbing only the bathtub. But she might as well be scrubbing herself.

Akerman once said in an interview in Camera Obscura that Jeanne Dielman is a feminist film “because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. A kiss or a car crash comes higher, and I don’t think that’s accidental. It’s because these are women’s gestures that they count for so little.” In Akerman’s masterpiece, these small gestures take on a visual richness that is also the richness of foiled narrative expectation. They can’t be assimilated back into a narrative—even if by the end of the film we feel that a narrative of a kind has, in fact, taken place. Akerman’s stylized depiction makes Jeanne Dielman’s gestures strangely mesmerizing. The film allows for visual pleasure in Jeanne’s slight, almost imperceptible flourishes in the way she moves her hands. It is no exaggeration to say that the best part of watching this film is watching the main character knead ground beef—just slightly sensually—to make meatloaf.

Jeanne Dielman isn’t out on video, so don’t pass up any opportunity to see it. [After I wrote this it came out on DVD and it’s also streaming on Amazon and HBO Max.]