Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

The camera in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is low, and the frame often feels a bit narrow.  This is limiting for us viewers, but not for Jeanne Dielman, who is free to walk out of the frame and out of our sight without the camera following her.  The film shows us a character's daily life in rigorous detail, but it doesn't feel voyeuristic.  There is no pleasure derived from the sense that we're seeing something not intended for our eyes.  We have no power, and our attention is directed less toward people than to processes and a particular balance of objects. 

This is all more important than the plot, which can be summarized as follows: A woman named Jeanne Dielman does errands, cares for a friend's baby, and cooks dinner for her son, adhering to a strict routine. She makes money through prostitution, taking one client each day.  The film takes place over the course of three days in Jeanne's life, and on the third day she breaks from her routine.

Again, the camera lingers less on Jeanne and more on the daily processes she carries out.  We quickly realize how much work it takes to keep everything in Jeanne's apartment in its correct place.  Her household is perfectly composed, each object placed in an assigned position.  As she carries out quotidian duties, she disrupts the composition, but then sets everything back just so.  Jeanne's facility in the kitchen is quite satisfying to see if you've been cooking a lot.  We get the gratification of seeing things arise from a series of carefully executed steps, and a reestablishment of control over one's environment.  This pattern even applies to when she takes clients, with the way she fits their visits into a clear routine, with assigned places for every step.  Akerman said the film was "a love film" for her mother, that "it gives recognition to that kind of woman."  Part of her purpose in making Jeanne Dielman was to reject a "hierarchy of images" that places romance and action "higher in the hierarchy than washing up."

Jeanne is mostly silent when we see her on the first two days, focused on her tasks.  Occasionally we overhear background characters talking, or listen to a friend of Jeanne's go on about how difficult her day was, but Jeanne remains detached.  Despite how prosaic it all is, Delphine Seyrig's performance and the lack of any wasted effort in Jeanne's actions give her a slight air of confidence.  But after the second day, when Jeanne breaks from her routine, her body language changes to be more defensive, and she hesitates just a little before doing things. 

She tells her son she likes what she does.  She says that she's always wanted to manage a household and take care of a child.  Perhaps most importantly, she says that she never cared whether she would live such a life with a husband.  She would be perfectly content, if not better off, doing it on her own, as she does in this film.  When she says this, she towers over the audience: she is speaking to her son, who is lying down, and the camera is at his eye level while Jeanne stands behind him.  Also, the camera makes us accompany her son in this scene, and he cannot see Jeanne, though Jeanne can see him.  She's in control.

However, it's extremely important to consider what it means to linger on processes over characters.  It is only within a framework dominated by these processes that we perceive Jeanne's control over her surroundings, and when she's not executing them, she seems uncertain as to how to fill her time: one of the few moments in which Seyrig actually emotes is when Jeanne stops for a moment to have coffee.  She seems uneasy.  She has almost godlike power over the objects this film is chiefly made of; but those objects are so banal, and confined to such a limited space, that many people read the film as Jeanne being imprisoned by the expectation that women do domestic work, care for children, not take employment, etc.  In many scenes we can inexplicably see the faint reflection of flashing light on the walls of Jeanne's house, some glowing object shining through her window and just barely; intangibly altering the otherwise perfectly controlled aesthetic of Jeanne's home, keeping it from being completely insular.

Near the end of the second day, something changes.  Something happens with her client for that day.  We don't witness his visit, but we hear her voice through the door.  Afterward, her hair and demeanor are distinctly different from after her meeting with the client of the first day, the first two constants to be altered.  Her mannerisms change slightly.  She begins to make mistakes in her routine.  The mistakes are never more than slight: she overcooks some potatoes, she drops a brush, she forgets to put the lid back on an open container.  But despite how minor these errors are, they are truly disturbing.  By the time they happen we're familiar with the details of Jeanne's environment and the work it takes to maintain them, so small changes all carry life-altering potential.  By this point, we have seen that Jeanne can put a pot of potatoes on to boil, take a client, and know that the potatoes will be perfectly cooked by the end of their visit.  She has such precision; so what should it mean to us when she overcooks the potatoes?

It could be for any one of a number of reasons, but whatever it is, it came from this sexual encounter.  It was part of how she makes money; she has to selectively open the space under her control to maintain the influx needed to keep it alive, and the openings are unstable.  Jeanne attempts to regain control.  When she goes shopping the next day, she shares personal stories with the people she does business with, dropping the detached silence we saw on the second day.  She complicates the boundaries of the world she has thus far experienced as her own personal kingdom, leading to an outrageous ending.  The film proves to be as much about a need to close things off as it is about the need for everything to be maintained by a process.  This does relate to the easy political reading of this film, which finds Jeanne pushed to a certain mode of labor by gender roles, but it also plays into Akerman's upending of the "hierarchy of images," calling your attention to things most films try to elide.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's review of Rocco and His Brothers references Ben Sachs, saying that one of the most subversive things a film can do is to show the characters at work.  This is what Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles does.  It shows that everything is placed and maintained in its position by ongoing processes; like Portabella's Cuadecuc, Vampir, it shows that reality has layers of contingency.  The mundane life of any given person comprises an astronomical number of seemingly insignificant details, none of which are static.  They require work to keep them intact, and disturbingly, that work is no guarantee that we won't lose control of them.  Perhaps three and a half hours sounds long, but the history implied behind every gesture and action in this film spans a much longer period than that. 

A lot of people will decide they don't want to see this film when they learn what it is, but for those who persist in their curiosity, this film can change the way you look at the world.  Michael Phillips said it "trained his senses"; Rosenbaum thought it "trains one to recognize and respond to fluctuations and nuances," bringing you closer to the "roots of experience."  You start to think the forces that produce and reproduce your own life, and how they exist beyond the boundaries of the stories you tell about yourself that focus on momentous, exceptional occasions.

The film is also proof of what Noël Burch called "the work of the signifier," the way our perception of a film's content is affected by its sensory qualities, how it orients and disorients us.  You could film a person going about their daily life in any number of ways, but they wouldn't be the same as this; it's Akerman's deliberate construction that determines the tone and focus of the objects the film depicts, and those in turn inform the meaning we find in them.