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

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Belgium-France, 1975) 201 min color DIR-SCR: Chantal Akerman. PROD: Corinne Jénart, Evelyne Paul. DOP: Babette Mangolte. CAST: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. (Janus Films)

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At once minimalist (scenes shot mainly in master shots) and meticulous (real-time sequences of making coffee, peeling potatoes and kneading ground meat), Chantal Akerman’s arthouse classic has been, depending on one’s mileage, lauded as a feminist masterpiece (although Ms. Akerman had resisted calling her work “feminist”), or derided as a relentless exercise of tedium. The truth of Jeanne Dielman is probably somewhere in the middle.

This three-hour-plus symphony of turning light switches and on off, moving furniture to pull out the sofa bed, and preparing meals, is three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, a middle-aged widow living in a small Brussels apartment with her son Sylvain. While he is at school during the day, she augments her income by looking after an infant in the early afternoons, and just before dinner, selling sexual services to regular clients. Her daily routines are seen in such detail to represent the rhythms of a modern woman’s domestic life: everything is routine and joyless, even sex. It appears to be a naturalistic depiction of daily ritual, and yet the moment during the first night when Sylvain asks her mother how she met his late father, feels more for the convenience of the audience to explain away a lot of exposition that could be revealed visually.

Jeanne Dielman is formally reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud in its depiction of characters and environment, Andy Warhol’s single-take symphonies, and Robert Bresson’s offscreen imagery, in the repeated patterns of taking clients’ coats and hats while faces are cropped offscreen to enforce the passionless routine. The sex tastefully takes place behind closed doors to rob the film of any intimacy: everything from boiling potatoes to sexual liaisons is purely mechanical, often mathematically precise.

On the surface, Jeanne Dielman appears to be a film that you can “get” while reading about it, instead of devoting time to view it. And yet, I can say that for a 200-minute movie, I was never bored. Like Ms. Akerman’s other films of the period (Je Tu Il Elle; Les Rendezvous d’Anna), once one surrenders to its syntax, it becomes habit-forming. This film transcends the similar Warhol aesthetic because it is “about” something. Its length is necessary to immerse oneself into these subtle patterns, and for that matter, the subtleties in which these patterns slowly become unravelled on the third day.

The suspense derives from such details as accidentally overcooking the potatoes, dropping a spoon, or pouring out bad coffee: all details of how this woman begins to deviate from her enforced regimen. (But enforced by what? Circumstance? Society?) The camera setups differ slightly from the presentation of the same routines seen earlier. These nuances add to Jeanne’s change of character, which culminates into an act that at first seems as irrational as those of a Bresson protagonist.

All is presented, but little is revealed. For instance, Jeanne and Sylvain are seen leaving the apartment every night. We are never told where: is it to mass? Therefore, sex and religion are equally mysterious yet routine? One leaves the film perhaps with more questions than answers: was the final act in retribution for feeling pleasure for a change? Was this her atonement for such a sin? One may feel cheated after devoting an unusually long period of time with this character, but in truth, how much do we really learn of a person within three days? If one is prepared to meet the film on its own terms, its rewards are large. I still have mixed feelings about it, perhaps because of the ending, but on the other hand, I’m still thinking about it days later.