The Conventional Pleasures of “Jeanne Dielman,” and Other Notes

On January 14th, the Toronto International Film Festival’s luxurious Lightbox theater exhibited a 35mm print of Jeanne Dielman on their second-largest screen, with a lively introduction by the film’s director of photography, Babette Mangolte. It’s hard to imagine better conditions to properly reflect on this very unique movie, so reflect I did.

Full title: ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ (1975)

Jeanne Dielman, if you don’t know, is a three-and-a-half-hour Belgian movie about housework. That isn’t exaggeration or caricature: director Chantal Akerman sought to depict the totality of domestic duties imposed on women, and for the majority of the film’s running time we watch the titular widow alone in her apartment, keeping house for her teenaged son. If the movie is famous for anything it is the long scenes of cooking, dishwashing, shoe-polishing, and so on. It is a movie that most people on Earth probably wouldn’t sit through, so when it topped Sight and Sound’s latest list of the ‘Greatest Films of All Time,’ a lot of internet whiners whined on the internet that it was a pretentious choice. Even the film’s defenders tend to agree with its detractors that Jeanne Dielman is not what we think of as entertaining, that it withholds the action, comedy, sex, suspense, inspiration or visual beauty for which most people watch movies. As Jessica Winter put it succinctly for the New Yorker, “‘Jeanne Dielman’ itself is not pleasurable, or at least not in any obvious or easy sense.” On this viewing, however, it occurred to me that the movie’s reputation as a kind of anti-entertainment is not deserved. It’s easy to imagine the avante-garde museum piece that this movie could have been had Akerman only shot an endless sequence of household tasks; such a film would have fulfilled Akerman’s goal of showing the minutiae of housework, but it’s clear that doing so was not the limit of her ambition. She also wanted to tell a good story. In other words, she wanted to entertain, and she did so more conventionally than might at first seem obvious.

Narrative cinema often takes one of two generally distinctive approaches to entertainment, for simplicity’s sake let’s call these conventional and unconventional. Conventional entertainments target an emotional response – fear, laughter, excitement, etc – and entertain by triggering that response as frequently as possible; these immediate emotional responses comprise the “pleasures” which most people associate with moviegoing. Genre movies and comedies fall into this category, but so do popular dramas that appeal to emotions as their primary means of holding the audience’s attention (The Fabelmans is a fine recent example). Alternatively, a smaller proportion of unconventional movies decline to provoke such immediate responses, and entertain by slowly engrossing the audience in a world or story. Movies like this tend to cultivate an impression of realism that would be interrupted by any transparent cinematic appeal to emotion. Many international art movies fit this description, movies like Eyimofe, Dust in the Wind, Kes or Jia Zhangke’s Pickpocket. Viewers of this kind of film might feel moved or amused or frightened, but usually as the result of a steady accumulation of narrative information; the films are rarely caught visibly trying to elicit these emotions. Unconventional entertainments are often accused by less-open-minded viewers of being “slow” movies where “nothing happens,” not because their narratives are truly uneventful but because these films don’t continually trigger the “pleasures” which popular cinema has trained most people to expect. Since it has a very slow pace, a gargantuan running time and a relatively uneventful narrative, Jeanne Dielman might seem like the ultimate slow movie where nothing happens, but I think it actually belongs in the former category with the conventional entertainments.

In Jeanne Dielman, what holds the viewer’s attention is not a patient curiosity about 1970s Belgium or the human interest of a gradually-unfolding slice of life, but rather the far more immediate suspense which Akerman maintains from the outset. The movie’s dramatic movement has more in common with a nightmarish thriller like Repulsion than with any social-realist drama. The narrative follows the gradual mental breakdown of Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) as she tries and fails to maintain the domestic routine which forms the basis of her identity, until she snaps and commits a shocking murder. Every day, Jeanne sends her son off to school, tidies up the house, does her shopping, sleeps with a john for a little extra cash and then makes dinner, but when she screws up a single step in her routine everything falls apart with the logic of nightmares.

The sex work component has an impressive, multifaceted effect on the story. The johns serve as a scathing metaphor for 20th-century husbands: they use Jeanne for sex, dole out the cash and then make themselves scarce. But beyond the thematic, Jeanne’s sex work serves the practical narrative purpose of adding suspense. At first and for a long while, Jeanne seems immaculately controlled and composed, but since the very first shot of the movie depicts Jeanne taking money for sex, the audience is aware of a certain level of danger under her perfect surface (changing attitudes about sex work notwithstanding). Although that danger takes a long time to emerge, it’s there from the beginning. The content of the movie is never just ‘a woman doing housework’ in the style of the aforementioned hypothetical museum piece; the content is always ‘a woman does housework, she has a dark secret, what will become of her?’ The scenario has suspense baked in from the outset, and for long stretches of time, creating and expanding this tension is Akerman’s sole method of engaging her audience, even if she does so at the slowest imaginable pace. Unlike the unconventional entertainments discussed above, there is very little narrative or anthropological detail to keep the audience interested, almost all the movie has to offer is the “pleasure” of its finally excruciating suspense. Rather than the ultimate slow movie, Jeanne Dielman is the ultimate slow-burn thriller.

Which is not to say that Jeanne Dielman is just like any other thriller. One of the most impressive things about Akerman’s film is her very unconventional deployment of the conventional tools of emotional manipulation. In any horror movie or thriller, a certain amount of tense waiting (ie suspense) is necessary in order for the thrills to really thrill when they come. In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman elongates these periods as far as they can go; you could say the movie is a single prolonged period of suspense leading up to a single thrill. Sure, an impatient viewer would not read the film as full of suspense, but for the viewer who’s able to stay on Akerman’s wavelength, the emotional experience of Jeanne Dielman is similar to that of the scene in a horror movie when someone is snooping around a dark basement. Akerman is also remarkably successful at keeping the peculiar stakes of her story salient at all times. Though this is never stated explicitly, it’s clear that Jeanne’s mental state relies on her daily schedule going off without a hitch. When she commits the fatal error of overcooking dinner, the mistake has a domino effect on the rest of her routine, and each vicissitude pushes Jeanne closer to the edge. As a result, otherwise small moments – like when Jeanne forgets to wash a dish, or when she accidentally drops a spoon – take on the weight of doomful omens. Akerman creates a heightened reality where each household task becomes a high-stakes event with potentially terrible consequences to Jeanne’s mental state. It’s hard to imagine an approach to suspense with greater minimalism, but when that suspense finally pays off with Jeanne snapping and killing a john with a pair of scissors, the effect is anything but small. The first time I saw the film there were gasps in the theater, not a response you’d expect from a movie that shirked conventional entertainment. Like many a good filmmaker, Akerman started with thematic concerns and relatable subject matter and then to communicate these as powerfully as possible she resorted to the conventional tools of emotional manipulation.

In addition to being suspenseful, Jeanne Dielman is unexpectedly funny. It is also not a realistic or naturalistic movie, despite all the scenes that could be described both figuratively and literally as kitchen sink. When Jeanne spends five minutes preparing a meatloaf, it’s true that for those five minutes we are basically watching a documentary of Seyrig performing this action, so people could be forgiven for thinking this movie has a documentary quality. But whenever the characters open their mouths, the tone is ironic satire, even parody. When Jeanne and her son sit together over dinner, they don’t chit chat the way normal family members would; each terse line is delivered to comically highlight everything the characters aren’t saying. When Jeanne reads her son a relative’s letter with bizarre and absurd roboticism, the moment is not just ‘like’ a parody of familial obligation, it is a parody, and straightforwardly so. Likewise, the scene when a neighbour drops off her infant for Jeanne to babysit: in an unbroken monologue, the neighbour unloads every minute detail of her life’s worries while Jeanne nods with humorous indifference; it’s a bit that could exist verbatim in a mainstream comedy. Nearly every dialogue scene got laughs from the TIFF audience; these funny moments break the tension of the more fraught scenes, meaning they function exactly the way comic relief does in any movie.

As you can see, Jeanne Dielman has some pleasure to offer, and it’s not as daunting as it seems. In fact, as long as you have three and a half hours to spare, it’s a surprisingly easy watch. As each very long scene goes by, it does not take the viewer much effort or time to pick up on exactly what’s happening, textually or subtextually. This, one could argue, is an innate problem with Akerman’s stylistic approach (hey, even the Greatest Film Ever Made isn’t perfect): the viewer is constantly ahead of the movie. The amount of information one needs to keep in one’s head in order understand Jeanne Dielman is much less than that of many movies less than half its length; as a result, this is a movie anyone could follow – at least, on the level of story – while doing the dishes, making dinner, murdering a john. Of course, to truly experience Jeanne Dielman, the viewer has to be willing to stay as focused as Jeanne on the minutiae of her tasks. This is why the movie theater experience is really the best way to watch this film (and the only way I’ve watched it, so far), when the possibility of distraction is drastically reduced. Having said that, is there anyone who watches Jeanne Dielman, in any setting, and maintains rapt attention for its entirety? I’m inclined to doubt that, which begs an intriguing question: could the Greatest Film Ever Made also be a film that everyone who watches it inevitably tunes in and out of? Why not, I suppose, though it’s obvious any argument about which movie is ‘The Greatest’ is a fundamentally stupid argument. If it’s unavoidable that Jeanne Dielman will lose its viewers’ attention here or there, that does not diminish its great value as a work of art.

Something else that struck me on this viewing is that while Jeanne is surely a victim of society’s strict gender roles, she is also a victim of herself. Either from obligation or compulsion, she singularly depends on her homemaker identity to stay sane, and she continually rejects opportunities to make human connections that might provide some psychological relief. There is the aforementioned scene with the chatty neighbor, who voices discontents which Jeanne may share but whom Jeanne bluntly ignores. On the street, a female acquaintance stops Jeanne and tries to set up a get-together; Jeanne shoots her down, citing business, although she has no social life that we can see. In another of those humorous scenes that more than verges on parody, Jeanne’s son unleashes a bizarre monologue expressing the terror he felt as a child when he learned about sex, and his disgust that Jeanne was subjected to such a lurid practice at the hands of his deceased father. This monologue, all about the horrors of heteronormativity, is basically a comically over-the-top recitation of the film’s subtext. Jeanne does not live in a world where what ills her goes unspoken, her own son seems to have a grasp of it, and yet, rather than take an opportunity to open up to her son about her lot in life, Jeanne dismisses his concerns as silly and shuts down the conversation. Ultimately, what incites Jeanne’s breakdown is not the oppression of her lifestyle, but the disruption of it. Jeanne is never more distraught than when she has a gap of time that she can’t fill with a motherly task. When she rides the elevator in her building, the few seconds of being alone in her own company seem to deeply unsettle her. In a tense, disturbing scene, Jeanne, with too much time on her hands, aggressively “mothers” that infant she’s babysitting despite the child’s screaming discomfort. If Jeanne had a second child and therefore double the amount of domestic work to do, she might have been sufficiently distracted from her own unhappiness and that john might never have met that pair of scissors. In characterizing Jeanne this way, I don’t think Akerman was making a reductive point that women are complicit in their own subjugation, etc. Rather, Akerman was depicting a woman who uses her sense of identity as a shield against deep and inescapable anxieties. It’s a universal, relatable problem, even for this blog-writing non-woman.

An interesting question is when exactly Jeanne’s decline begins, and I found one detail compelling. The movie depicts roughly three days of Jeanne’s life and on the first day her routine goes off without a hitch. After a terse dinner with her son – who is not exactly overflowing with gratitude for all his mother’s hard work – Jeanne sits down to knit him a sweater. While she knits, the radio DJ introduces a piece of classical music performed by a female pianist. For a few minutes, two instances of female creativity are juxtaposed: a professional musician whose artistic accomplishment redounds to her own reputation and success, and a mother whose creativity serves her son. Perhaps that juxtaposition was as salient to Jeanne as it was to me; perhaps the confrontation with other possibilities for women than her motherly role was the first chink that led to her whole life cracking apart. Akerman may not have had such specific intentions in mind, but surely the juxtaposition was no accident.

Jeanne Dielman offers a lot to think about and, as I hope I’ve demonstrated here, it’s not void of the pleasures that typify conventional entertainments. Now that it’s the Greatest Movie Ever Made, some people will watch it who wouldn’t have otherwise, and I think that’s wonderful. My last thought for now doesn’t have a lot to do with Jeanne Dielman, except by coincidence. The morning of that TIFF screening I watched a movie for the first time, Death Race 2000. That’s the exploitation film about a cross-country race in which competitors collect points for every pedestrian they run over (the more vulnerable the pedestrian, the higher the points). Death Race 2000 was released in 1975, the same year as Jeanne Dielman, but I did not pair them intentionally – I just watch a lot of movies. Although on paper they’re complete opposites, the films have a little more in common than you’d think: both are small movies created outside the mainstream, both make up for their lack of budget with charming DIY artistry, both strike a delicate balance between social commentary and sarcastic humour. Both movies use shocking acts of violence to land their points (Death Race 2000 does this slightly more often than Jeanne Dielman). But a major difference between the two films is that Death Race 2000 will never, in a million years, make it on Sight and Sound’s ‘Greatest Films’ list. Although Jeanne Dielman replacing the more mainstream Vertigo for the number one spot on that list indicates an expansion of the popular taste, it’s an expansion in one direction, towards one type of respectable art film. That’s still a good thing, but there are a lot of valuable movies out there, and many are still pigeonholed and dismissed based on the superficialities of genre and milieu. The odd need to enshrine a canon of ‘Great Films’ seems to automatically exclude certain qualities which are valued in other contexts, but when we’re not writing such lists, I think most film lovers are aware of a commonplace fact: the ‘greatest film’ is the last one that gave us a really good time. For me, on January 14th, Jeanne Dielman and Death Race 2000 shared that title.

Death Race 2000 (1975)