NOW PLAYING
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
The director Chantal Akerman’s three-hour-and-twenty-one-minute shot across the bow of cinematic modernism, from 1975, puts time onscreen as it was never seen before. The title character, played by the porcelain diva Delphine Seyrig, is a middle-aged, middle-class prostitute who turns tricks in her bourgeois apartment with dapper johns who make discreet appointments. Widowed nearly six years, she is raising her adolescent son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), alone, and handling a standard round of errands and chores—all of which play out at extraordinary length and detail, in static takes framed squarely and distantly. Whether she’s making a bed, cooking a meal, bathing herself, or shopping, Seyrig evokes a dancer’s intense physical discipline and clipped, angular precision. Such care for the material world borders on the obsessive, and the absence of thought behind Jeanne’s rigid, orderly, compartmentalized regime is exactly the point: this living perpetual-motion machine can’t bear the slightest immobility, and when the fixed boundaries of her life give way to her work, the results are catastrophic. Akerman’s chillingly sardonic feminist fable is built on a sublime paradox, the elusive identity of someone who, as the title suggests, is so easily identified. Her vast elaboration of tiny variations on infinitely repeated gestures recalls the music that Steve Reich and Philip Glass were composing in the same era. In French.—Richard Brody (Film Forum; Jan. 23-29.)