Bruxelles. Jeanne is a housewife in her 40s, living in a small apartment together with her teenage son Sylvain after the death of her husband. She spends her day making lunch, dinner, and occasionally having sex with men for money in the bedroom. In the evening, she goes out for a walk with Sylvain. They get a letter from her aunt in Canada. Sylvain goes to a Flemish school to be with his friend. On the second day, Jeanne becomes more nervous and erratic. She goes to pay her bills at the post office and bring Sylvain's shoes for repair to the shoemaker. On the third day, Jeanne sits for a long time on the chair. After a customer has sex with her, she takes scissors and stabs him in the neck, killing him. Jeanne then returns back to sit at the table.
You know 2022 is a bad year when the Sight & Sound poll released that year picked "Jeanne Dielman" as the best film of all time, in the critic's category. Chantal Akerman's art-film is a good meditation on the existentialist themes of loneliness, isolation and feeling of empty existence, yet it drags on for far longer than its point can sustain it. This is a movie that needed a better editor: Akerman opted for an "epic about boredom" with a running time of 3 hours, yet the movie didn't require anything above the 1.5 hours mark. While such long, static 5-minute kitchen scenes of the title heroine dipping pork meat in eggs, and then in flour and bread crumbs to prepare schnitzels make for interesting recipes, what does the cinema viewer get from them? As the book "1001 Movies You Must See" observes, Akerman aims to capture the "drab routine of her life in real time", so that the viewers can sense and experience how it looks like to be this housewife, articulating a depressing mood of a woman who has nothing going for her in this void life. Jeanne's bizarre, radical decision in the penultimate scene is almost a sort of protest against the grey world, and the movie sets it up subtly—on the first day, Jeanne does everything perfectly (dinner, prostitution as she puts the money in the porcelain in the living room...), but on the second day, cracks start to appear, as she becomes sloppy at times (she overcooks a meal on the stove and thus throws it into the trash can; she forgets to put the lid on the porcelain with the money...), and on the third day, everything seems to go wrong for her, showing her quiet mental collapse. However, themes alone don't make up a movie—"Jeanne Dielman" is thinly written and directed, without much ingenuity or creativity that would stand out. This life routine goes so far that one gets the impression than anything in life is worthy for an Akerman movie, no matter how trivial, making even "Seinfeld" seem significant. The main strategy of the film is almost self-defeating: Akerman wants to depict how boring and monotone life is by making a boring and monotone film.
Grade:++
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