In the early stages of Jeanne Dielman, we see a light flickering from an unspecified source on the walls of the titular character’s apartment. At first glance, it could be the headlights of a car passing outside the window, but the longer we spend time in this space, and the longer the pattern of flickering persists, it becomes clear that it’s the light of a sign outside – an altogether less human source, that will become part of the environment of routine, triviality and inevitability that leads to Jeanne’s psychological deterioration over the course of the hypnotically gruelling 3+ hours we spend with her.
The first words of dialogue uttered by her are an order: to her teenage son, she asks him not read at the dinner table. The discipline she imposes on herself carries over to him as well. The two are – to borrow a chestnut – far away, yet close; most touchingly displayed when they converse guilelessly but distantly about topics like sex and their family’s history before bed. Their dinners involve them eating mechanically together, each collecting and consuming their spoonfuls of food in a comically staccato fashion that recalls separate pistons of train wheels joining in motion momentarily, before spinning again out of sync. Her encounters with her clients as a prostitute take place offscreen, transpiring in the time between a jump cut from the corridor in the afternoon daylight to evening darkness. Art cinema has a history of actively unerotic sex scenes as an illustration of human incompatibility, but Akerman upstages that device by simply not showing them at all, as if Jeanne’s mundane routines register more vividly. Though ostensibly a feminist film, the men in the film are not vilified – Akerman is not creating a polemic so much as intense empathy with the quietly oppressed women that Jeanne serves as an avatar for.
Akerman’s greatest coup is reinvigorating all the dubious virtues that are traditionally associated with minimalist cinema, as well as adding a few of her own. A sudsy dish appearing on the drying rack, Jeanne dropping the shoe polisher while scrubbing, leaving the lid of the cash dish off, and other blips in the various routines perform as substitutes for the hoarier shorthands of horror that we associate with narrative cinema. Akerman not only succeeds in lulling us into a state of hypnosis before unnerving us with the slightest tweak of Jeanne’s routine, but also in developing an intense alertness in the viewer that stays long after the film finishes.
Though the film flirts with familiarity at time, alternately recalling Polanski's Repulsion and Antonioni's Red Desert, it is a singular experience that never feels like a Warhol-ian formalist stunt (which is sounds like on paper). There is a perverse sensual pleasure to be had from the accumulation of repetitions and differences that are presented to us. Akerman understands the concept of routine as alternately a thing of comfort as well as resignation from life’s more edifying-if-risky endeavors (Jeanne explains to her son that she never wants to adjust to a new man after the death of her husband), and for a while the film is something of a game of ‘spot the difference’, before it becomes harrowing.
For all of Akerman’s formal rigor/precision, there is also a great deal of willful sloppiness in her filmmaking. Boom mic errors abound, cameras are reflected in the myriad of shiny surfaces (kettles, cabinet glasses, etc) on display, while passer-by’s can be seen in the street scenes looking distractingly into the camera. The easiest defense of such uncharacteristic errors is that it’s a Brechtian distancing tactic, but Akerman has already replaced drama with experiential empathy, so there is nothing to be distanced from. Rather, by having no pretense toward separating the ontological world from the film’s diegesis, Akerman creates the sense of Jeanne moving through her routines defiantly as well as delusionally, a performer going through the motions in every sense.
It could be said that Akerman shows a relative lack of imagination by having Jeanne resort to murder as the logical outcome of her psychological deterioration. But this thudding inevitability is part of the point. By the time we see a blood-stained Jeanne in the film’s final shot, as she collects herself at the dinner table. Seyrig open and closes her eyes, bobs her head up and down as if in a voodoo trance, and we are similarly left reeling, contemplating her actions in relation to the preceding, and held in suspense as we wait for something (a doorbell ring?) to awake her from her state of mania… needless to say, it never happens.
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