Chantal Akerman’s rigorous study of despair. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

SHOWN in New Zealand for the first time for decades, Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s formally and thematically revolutionary Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles remains a neglected miracle. While Akerman has been referenced by fashionable directors like Todd Haynes (Julianne Moore in Safe and Far From Heaven is the American heir to Dielman’s titular protagonist) or Michael Haneke (The Seventh Continent), her work remains criminally under-released and under-appreciated. Jeanne Dielman was made after her brilliantly grungy deconstruction of female sexuality, Je, Tu, Il, Elle, but is even more uncompromising in its depiction of the banal repression of everyday-ness.

The film looks at three days of Jeanne Dielman (an understated Delphine Seyrig), a bored, bourgeois housewife. Having been widowed, a distant son and awkward neighbours are the only human contact she has – that is, if you don’t count the fact that she has to resort to selling her body to make a bit of money on the side. But even the sex doesn’t satisfy her (sex after all, is nothing more than a transaction), her days ultimately a meaningless Sisyphean routine. The protagonist’s mental restlessness in Je, Tu, Il, Elle becomes trapped within the drab, spotless apartment of Jeanne Dielman.

The narrative initially sets up the ‘ideal’ day – where everything simply happens almost in real time. While it’s rigorously banal, it’s never less than hypnotic. Akerman focuses on the minor details of each action (cleaning, washing, cooking, tidying, walking, turning lights on or off) and show that they are as important despite the visual impression that this is so banal. Filmed in a flat, static two-dimensional style, Jeanne Dielman is constantly moving (until the end) in and out of frame, but is trapped within Akerman’s claustrophobic narrative.

However, as the days start repeating in their cycle, more and more fissures appear. The baby that she has to briefly baby-sit won’t stop crying. Her coffee just doesn’t taste right. Her café doesn’t have its usual waitress. She drops spoons. She burns the potatoes. It’s as if Akerman has set up a music piece on loop – and each time it’s looped, added in an extra wrong note into each bar, hoping that by the end it sounds like a discordant mess. The film justifies its considerable running time by this attention to detail (anything less would have felt fake). Through the accumulation of all these petty problems, the film cruelly justifies the final two shots of violence, the violence being the inevitable culmination of this disquieting routine.

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