While I’m a reasonably adventurous cinefile, the reputation and running time of Chantal Ackerman’s acclaimed character study Jeanne Dielman kept it near the bottom of my to-view list for decades—I was challenged to muster enthusiasm for a 3.5-hour picture comprising extraordinarily long takes of mundane activities. Even when Jeanne Dielman was named the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound in 2022 (more on that later), the movie seemed as if it would be a slog to watch. Now that I can finally report back from the other end of Jeanne Dielman’s 201 minutes, of course I understand that being a slog to watch is part of the picture’s design. It’s open to debate whether the film’s abnormal length was the best way achieve her goals, but clearly Ackerman wanted viewers to feel as numbed by repetition as the leading character does. Accordingly, the key question is whether the movie rewards viewers’ time. I believe the answer is yes, though perhaps not to the degree implied by Jeanne Dielman’s placement on the Sight and Sound list.
For those unfamiliar with the picture, it depicts three days in the life of fortysomething widow Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), who lives with her young-adult son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), in a Brussels apartment. Jeanne supports the household with sex work, receiving one client per day as part of a highly regimented routine. Up each morning to prepare breakfast and send Syvlain off to school; cleaning, errands, and meal preparation interspersed with occasional childcare for a neighbor’s infant; then evenings spent serving dinner and helping Sylvain with schoolwork, even though he’s so absorbed in reading that he barely communicates with his mother. (The boy’s age and grade level is never stated, but he’s either a high-schooler or a college student.) Jeanne Dielman is as rigidly structured as the title character’s lifestyle, with chapter breaks identifying transitions between days, and the glacially paced plot only gets cooking about halfway through the movie, when an unexplained change in Jeanne’s mental state causes her to become dislodged from everyday activities, for instance dropping a spoon or forgetting to close one button on her housecoat. All of this is preamble to a single noteworthy event, which won’t be spoiled here but which retroactively imbues Jeanne Dielman with layers of meaning.
It should be apparent by now that appraising Ackerman’s movie by conventional standards is pointless—even though the narrative has an ordinary shape, the style is borderline experimental. Ackerman deliberately avoids opportunities to take us into her leading character’s mind, forcing viewers to extract Jeanne’s psychology from her behavior. (The director reportedly coached leading lady Seyrig to constrain her facial expressions.) Viewers get enough information to grasp the contours of Jeanne’s life, but then Ackerman adds the element that makes Jeanne Dielman so challenging—outrageously long takes of activities ranging from the cleaning of dishes to the preparation of meals. Throughout Jeanne Dielman, a static camera watches Seyrig do uninteresting things in their full durations. Presumably the film’s advocates zero in on this aspect as one of the picture’s great strengths, a means of forcing viewers to engage with the grinding tedium of domestic work.
And then there’s the climax, which provides a bracing commentary on the toll such domestic work, done in the service of men, has on women.
I’m certain the film’s champions would argue that it must be watched repeatedly in order to appreciate its profundity. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though I acknowledge my willingness to watch comparatively dim-witted entertainment films over and over again compares poorly with my reluctance to spend another 201 minutes with Jeanne. Nonetheless, I feel confident that I took much of what the film has to offer from one viewing. Jeanne Dielman is, in its idiosyncratic and unwieldy fashion, both a crisp statement and a potent conversation piece. But could it possibly be the greatest film of all time, as the contributors to Sight and Sound’s list determined? No. It is difficult to perceive that designation as anything other than a rebuttal to decades of male-dominated cinema discourse. However, exalting Jeanne Dielman over enduring films directed by men could also be seen as an amplification of Jeanne Dielman’s message—in a patriarchal society, a women has to make a hell of a noise to get heard.
I’m certain the film’s champions would argue that it must be watched repeatedly in order to appreciate its profundity. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though I acknowledge my willingness to watch comparatively dim-witted entertainment films over and over again compares poorly with my reluctance to spend another 201 minutes with Jeanne. Nonetheless, I feel confident that I took much of what the film has to offer from one viewing. Jeanne Dielman is, in its idiosyncratic and unwieldy fashion, both a crisp statement and a potent conversation piece. But could it possibly be the greatest film of all time, as the contributors to Sight and Sound’s list determined? No. It is difficult to perceive that designation as anything other than a rebuttal to decades of male-dominated cinema discourse. However, exalting Jeanne Dielman over enduring films directed by men could also be seen as an amplification of Jeanne Dielman’s message—in a patriarchal society, a women has to make a hell of a noise to get heard.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: GROOVY
