On Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 5:01:35 PM UTC-7,
wlah...@gmail.com wrote:
Hey,
I'm a big fan of Chantal Akerman and I don't care who knows it.
"Jeanne Dielman" is a film I've seen recently and long after "Akerman
in the '70s" and "La Captive" and those black and white beauties where
woman are roaming around with no particular place to go. To "get" "La Captive" is to grok film noir. Not the jingoistic cops-and-robbers
movies with fedoras and gats but the real deal.
"Jeanne Dielman" is the story of a woman told over three days. A widow
with a son and an afternoon trick to pay the rent. She -- and her
clients -- are middle-aged, middle-class people living in a city
somewhere in Europe. Jeanne's world is crumbling but detecting it from
her routine can be illusive. One major clue is when she ruins the
potatoes for dinner and that requires conversation out of the norm
with her son. We are observing in dead-on cinematography the
unraveling of a soul who doesn't see the clues we do (even if, at
first, they appear meaningless). It's one of those films where when it
ends you go "wtf was that about?" and two later you're in line at the
deli and it smacks you in the head. The Village Voice -- who,
admittedly, I think are a bunch of cineastes with their heads up their
asses -- called it the 19th greatest film of the 20th century. The
NYTimes called it the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the
history of the cinema."
At over 3 hours it's a bear. Yet, afterwards you realize not a single
frame was wasted. Not a motion out of joint. Effing brilliant and
worth every minute.
William
www.williamahearn.com
https://www.vox.com/culture/23488576/jeanne-dielman-sight-sound-best-2022
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