Jeanne Dielman - Make watching classic films part of your routine

With all the extra time given to us ‘thanks to’ the coronavius quarantine, it is an opportune knock out some of those long daunting films that have been on your need to see list for years, but which require a special attention that we usually do not have with all the distractions and temptations of normal life. One such film is Belgian director Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. Clocking in at an epically long 3 hours and 45 minutes, the film does not so much tell a story as it shows you a woman methodically doing her daily chores over a three day period until something in her snaps.

Jeanne Dielman feels less like a film than a piece of performance art in many ways. It is hard to compare seeing it with any other film watching experience I have ever had. In runtime it is longer than such epics like any of The Lord of the Rings films, The Godfather films, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Ben Hur, Seven Samurai, or Scorcese’s most recent The Irishman. Yet instead of watching fantastic battle scenes, shoot outs, or sword fights, we watch a woman carefully cook, clean, and prepare her bed for an afternoon caller.

The film is very trying on an audience's attention span, especially in the modern age of youtube and smartphones where even watching a 2 minute video seems a lot to ask. But that is not to say that the film is altogether boring. It has a mesmerizing effect to it. Jeanne is played by Delphine Seyrig, whose impressive filmography includes working with Luis Buñuel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Alain Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad, Francois Truffaut in Stolen Kisses, and Fred Zinneman in The Day of the Jackal. The first day Jeanne does everything so mechanically that it is almost awe inspiring how perfectly everything is timed out to fill her day. The camera is always still and in deep focus and almost always placed directly in front of a wall, never slanted towards the corners of the room. The takes are minutes long showing mundane tasks like washing the dishes or peeling potatoes. Akerman’s camerawork and editing are just as cold and efficient as Jeanne’s actions. She follows her as she shuts doors, opens windows, turns the lights on and off, and takes out and puts away dishes. Maybe follow is not the right word since the camera makes no movement but instead cuts as she walks in and out of rooms with determined movements.

Jeanne is alone all day except when her son comes home from school to eat dinner, when the neighbor pops by to drop off her baby as she runs errands, when Jeanne steps out quickly to run errands herself, or when we see one of her clients enter or exit her front door, and even in these circumstances she has little to say. Her and her son eat in total silence. She listens as her neighbor rattles on about how she did not know what to get at the butchers, she says hello and goodbye to her clients in her home and when she is a client herself in town, but she does not seem bothered to look for company or conversation which would only interrupt her daily routine.

Akerman’s film has rightly been called a feminist masterpiece. She shows us the day to day reality of a stay at home widowed mother of a teenage son without any consideration for our entertainment. We feel like we are living with Jeanne, and in Seyrig’s magnificent minimal performance, we interpret what she may or may not be thinking as she mindlessly performs the same tasks everyday. Akerman asserts that she does not view Jeanne’s ritual negatively, but as a viewer I can only take pity on her as someone who distracts herself with a continual stream of daily actions so as not to think, question, dream or hope. She lives a completely selfless existence, dedicated to serving her son dinner, but it also seems to be an empty existence. She never does anything for herself. She has numbed her mind, perhaps unconsciously to protect herself from her own thoughts, memories or desires.

But everything changes halfway through the second day. We begin to grow accustomed to Jeanne’s routine, following her footsteps as she executes the same tasks from the day before. Then, suddenly, something goes wrong as she is with her second caller. We do not see her sex scenes on the first two days, therefore we do not know what happened to rattle her senses. She shows him to the door, but then notices that she burned the potatoes she had on the stove. She forgets to close the window she opened to air out the room. She has to run out to get more potatoes and is unable to take her daily bath. Her hair is an unordered mess when her son comes home and he makes an offhand comment about it as assumingly any slight difference stands out in a life so monotonous. One mishap in her day puts everything else off, and she is unable to recover from it. What happened in her bedroom that second afternoon, we will never know, but it changed her life forever.

On the third day Jeanne is even less concentrated. As she is drying a washed spoon it falls to the floor and she has to wash it again. An action so mundane would go by unnoticed in our own lives or in any other film, but here, after watching near perfection for almost 2 hours, it is like the sound of an explosion. After waking up an hour early Jeanne finds herself with free time she is not used to having. On the second day she was rushed, now she is completely lost when she finds she has finished her chores early. She sits in a magnificent yellow armchair and stares off in front of her, somewhere between her lap and straight ahead, and we watch her for several minutes in silence. It is impossible to say what she is thinking, but she looks miserable to me, finally having time to reflect on her lonely life.

When her third client arrives we are shown her afternoon sex for the first time. When they finish she stands up, goes to the dresser, takes some scissors and stabs her client in the neck killing him. What does this murder mean? Is it Jeanne’s way at lashing out at the men who pay her for sex? Is it rebellion against a society where she can only be a stay at home mother or prostitute? Was it repressed rage at living such an empty uneventful life? Perhaps it was all of these things at the same time. Her routine and life concurrently blown away, the last shot is a very long one, again of Jeanne sitting alone in silence, this time in the dark at the dining room table, her hands bloody, waiting for her son to come home.

The film makes for especially interesting viewing as we are all trapped in our own houses. I too now have a routine that repeats itself again and again for what has been more than 40 days now, and besides a nearly daily phone or video call, I am completely alone and only have my computer, radio, and films to keep me company. I think we are seeing everything from a new point of view now, but I cannot imagine that I would have been as affected by Akerman’s film, nor have identified so much with the character of Jeanne if I had watched it under normal circumstances. I feel trapped in my routine, a slave to my everyday chores, and, like Jeanne, when I suddenly realize that I have a couple minutes when my mind is not occupied, it can be an overbearing feeling. Only instead of sitting in a big yellow armchair and staring off into nothingness, I lay on my bed, stare at the ceiling, and try not to dwell on the situation. Eventually I come up with something to do, maybe a new classic film that I should be watching. I have yet to kill any gentlemen callers.

But it is not right to compare myself too much to a widowed mother living in post World War II Belgium, Akerman’s film being about much more than someone with a boring routine. It is a film about middle aged women who lived through World War II and the reality of many of their post war lives. It may be a difficult watch, but it is masterfully made and completely original. Coronavirus or no coronavirus, it is worth watching this epic, and since we have more time than ever, why not now. I cannot say I will ever watch it again, but it is so effective and unforgettable after one viewing, I do not know if it would ever be necessary.