I have long been an admirer of the late Belgian filmmaker
Chantal Akerman. Her stories of women can range from psychologically probing to exuberantly joyful but in all cases they capture women within particular frameworks. Often described as a feminist filmmaker the films seem to transcend that narrow stricture though undoubtedly could be ascribed to that genre. So I was blown away when
Sight and Sound magazine announced Akerman’s
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) as the best movie of all time. Really!? I’d never heard of the film. One of the wonderful things about the high tech world in which we live is often these kind of films are literally at out finger tips, rather than having to travel hours to some art house cinema to see them, even if they were available. Sure enough,
Criterion Channel has that exact Sight and Sound list. So I spent three hours watching the flick. It didn’t disappoint.
Dielmann stars the famed French actress
Delphine Seyrig as an average housewife whose days consist of innumerable
repetitive tasks like cooking dinner, sewing, shining her son’s shoes, shopping for the evening meal and keeping an exquisitely tidy household, manically making sure the lights are turned off each time she leaves a room. But this respectable middle-class woman also has a side gig: she’s an at home afternoon prostitute. All this film does is record, day after day, her quotidian activities. The camera is often still and there are long shots of her doing such humdrum tasks as breading veal cutlets or setting the table. Yet it’s entirely absorbing, thanks in part to the incredible Seyrig. The film of course isn’t only about this. But if you think I’m going to tell you more! In an interview Akerman has said the picture recounts the daily role of tens of millions of women who live for domesticity and doting on their children or spouses. Yet they’re wholly otherwise empty vessels whether they realize it or not …. The second film is
Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970). This picture also was entirely unfamiliar to me but on Sight and Sound’s list. Loden was an interesting filmmaker and Broadway actress, who at one time was married to famed director
Elia Kazan, and known as the “female counterpart to John Cassavetes.”
Wanda is a knockout (and won Best Foreign Film at the
Venice Film Festival). Loden stars in the main role in this small budget picture made almost entirely with non-professional actors. As Wanda, she’s a character with no psychological or moral centre, drifting from place to place – and man to man – as the proverbial winds take her. Loden has described the flick as partly autobiographical, someone raised in the rural South and “uneducated.” The film itself has a Cassavetes,
French New Wave or
Cinéma verité feel to it, objectively capturing a certain time, place and mood. And, like in Dielmann, the main character acts in part in reflection to men…..
One other note: Despite
Jeanne Dielmann’s attributes, methinks Sight and Sound elevated this to the number one position due to a little political correctness, as is our woke age. It’s a great flick but, with tens of thousands of other movies over the decades to compare with, it’s highly arguable this would make the top of the heap.
