Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
2/10
Scarcely more interesting than watching paint dry, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles —even the title is too long—is the most boring, tedious film I have ever seen. That a 2022 worldwide critics’ poll by the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine named this garbage the greatest film of all time fills me with actual rage. Any critic who sincerely believes that should be taken out and shot, figuratively speaking. Yet a cursory glance at Rotten Tomatoes is full of critics throwing around terms like “masterpiece”, from which one can only conclude they are either pretentious, delusional or professional gaslighters.
Rarely has a film taken so long to say so little. Directed and written by Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman clocks in at a staggering 202 minutes. Any movie that demands that much of a viewer’s time needs to justify such an extreme length, which Akerman utterly fails to do. The film could have gotten the same message across in less than 90 minutes. That it drags on for nearly three and a half hours, almost of which is spent watching its title character perform the same chores over and over, makes it feel like Akerman is actively punishing her audience. Critics defend this as artful “slow cinema”, demanding patience from the viewer to reveal profound truths. I call bullshit. If a filmmaker wants to impress ideas upon the viewer, it’s their job to make those ideas interesting. Jeanne Dielman does the opposite.
The plot, such as it is, details three days in the life of Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), a middle-aged widow in Brussels who lives with her teenage son Sylvain (Jan Decorte). Her days are filled with an unchanging routine of chores: cooking, washing dishes, folding clothes, brewing coffee, peeling potatoes, making the bed, caring for her neighbour’s baby, running errands, and so on. Jeanne also works as a prostitute, having sex with a different client each day before her son comes home from school. Over the course of the movie, we see minor signs of unravelling in her orderly routine—overcooking the potatoes, missing a button on her clothes. Something exciting finally happens at the end of the movie, but it’s too little, too late. In the context of such a painfully long buildup, the ending can’t help but feel anticlimactic. To be fair, no ending could have saved a film this agonizingly overlong and dull.
Before apologists accuse me of missing the point of the movie: I’m fully aware what Akerman’s intentions were. The director called Jeanne Dielman “a love film for my mother. It gives recognition to that kind of woman.” She described the movie as a reaction to a cinematic “hierarchy of images” that place a car accident or a kiss “higher in the hierarchy than washing up ... And it's not by accident, but relates to the place of woman in the social hierarchy... Woman's work comes out of oppression and whatever comes out of oppression is more interesting. You have to be definite. You have to be.” Many critics have associated Akerman and her films with feminism. Upon Jeanne Dielman’s initial release, critic Louis Marcorelles called it the “first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema.”
The film is composed entirely of long, static shots that observe Jeanne in real time. That means repeated sequences in which we see Jeanne, for example, washing dishes or polishing her son’s shoes. Over and over, Akerman includes endless shots of characters doing uninteresting things. We see Jeanne walking to the elevator, opening the elevator doors, riding the elevator, walking out of the elevator. Akerman said showing events in real time “was the only way to shoot the film – to avoid cutting the action in a hundred places, to look carefully and to be respectful. The framing was meant to respect [Jeanne’s] space, her, and her gestures within it.” Aside from two scenes in which Jeanne and Sylvain listen to the radio, there’s no music at all, which means there’s even less for the audience to grab onto.
Admittedly there is one sequence at the two-and-a-half-hour mark, in which Jeanne is preparing meatloaf, when her hand movements mashing the ingredients together become almost hypnotic. Defenders say this is the point of the film: by dragging things out to such an extreme degree, the viewer pays more attention to everything they see on screen. But I fundamentally disagree with the idea that it’s a good thing when the viewer is so bored with a film, they start looking for anything even remotely interesting to focus on.
Andy Warhol used the same argument when he made his series of static films like Empire, which is eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building, or Sleep, which shows a man sleeping for six hours. It’s just an excuse for boring, lazy, pretentious films to masquerade as “artsy”. No surprise that Akerman cited Warhol as an influence. There are long stretches when Jeanne is sitting motionless and staring into space for minutes on end, to the point where I had to check to make sure I hadn’t accidentally paused the movie. Unlike still photographs, one of the defining characteristics of movies is supposed to be that they move. It’s right there in the name. Personally, I don’t watch movies to see repeated scenes of a person sitting still for several minutes at a time.
“You just don’t get it,” critics might say. “It’s supposed to be tedious and repetitive.” This reminds me of a meme where a vaporwave fan says, “You just don’t get it, man. The music is supposed to be shitty.” I say that as a fan of vaporwave. You could argue that as one of the earliest films described as “feminist”, Jeanne Dielman is trying to convey the tedium and drudgery of domestic labour women have historically been forced to perform. But the film didn’t need to be well over three hours to make that point. An anti-slavery film doesn’t need to show an enslaved person toiling in fields for three hours for us to understand slavery is bad. In fact, it would be less impactful than a movie that follows more traditional rules of cinematic storytelling and tries to keep the audience interested in what’s happening onscreen.
Perhaps most unforgivable is how in a movie of such extreme length that aims to depict a slice of ordinary life, Akerman provides little if any character depth. Despite spending nearly three and a half hours with Jeanne, we barely get a sense of who she is beyond the chores she performs. Saying that women are reduced to their ability to perform housework is a valid point, but if you’re going to make your movie more than three hours, the viewer deserves a greater sense of Jeanne’s personality and background. For the most part, Jeanne and Sylvain remain blank ciphers.
The interactions between Jeanne and her son are minimal and generally as dull as anything else. Each night the two of them sit together and eat their dinner in silence. At first I thought maybe they were still in mourning for the late family patriarch, but Jeanne’s husband and Sylain’s father has been dead for six years. The silence is so extreme that at a certain point, these two don’t even feel like human beings, just cardboard cutouts representing a director’s misguided affectations. Surely in reality, we might hear some mundane small talk, e.g. “How was your day?” Even that is too much for Akerman’s barren script.
There are two major exceptions: a pair of conversations Jeanne and Sylvain have on consecutive nights before each goes to bed. Now, I fully accept that there may be cultural differences in what topics parents and children discuss together. The film also doesn’t explicitly say Sylvain is unaware of his mother’s prostitution. But in both of these conversations, Sylvain asks his mother incredibly personal questions about sex. He shares a conversation he had with his friend Yan, who bought a book explaining the basics of sex. Yan “says a man's penis is like a sword,” Sylvain recalls. “The deeper you thrust it in, the better. But I thought, ‘A sword hurts.’ He said, ‘True, but it's like fire.’ But then where's the pleasure?” Putting aside a son saying all this to his mother, how old is Sylvain supposed to be asking questions this childish about sex? The actor looks like an older teenager.
Regardless, these conversations between Jeanne and Sylvain are the most character development we get in the entire movie, at last giving us a sense of who these people are. Jeanne says she met Sylvain’s father after the war and didn’t really feel like getting married, but says it “seemed to be ‘the thing to do.’” In one notable exchange Sylvain, referring to his dead father, asks Jeanne, “If he was ugly, did you want to make love to him?” She shrugs it off and says it wasn’t that important if he was ugly or not. “Well, if I were a woman, I could never make love with someone I wasn't deeply in love with,” Sylvain says. “How could you know?” Jeanne responds. You're not a woman.” End of conversation.
These exchanges are interesting and provide insight into not just Jeanne’s character, but the attitudes of Akerman—who was a lesbian—toward men, heterosexual relationships, marriage and prostitution. Akerman’s observation that women get married mainly because they’re expected to is still pertinent. Sylvain’s view that women shouldn’t have sex with men they aren’t in love with is belied not only by the real sexual habits of women, but by the specific context of prostitution.
All of these ideas could make for fascinating subject matter. If the movie had been no longer than 90 minutes, the fact that these are the most extensive conversations would have been perfectly fine. Unfortunately, in a 202-minute movie, these interesting parts are completely drowned out by having to sit through endless scenes of dishwashing or people riding elevators. Through its obscene length, the movie smothers anything compelling about itself and left this viewer at least more exhausted and infuriated than anything else.
People’s time is valuable, especially those who spend much of their day working. By giving up their time to a film, viewers are putting their trust in a filmmaker that it will not be a waste of their time. Akerman seems to relish in wasting the viewer’s time, which is cruelly ironic for a film about a woman who spends most of her day doing chores to little appreciation from those around her. Jeanne Dielman is tiresome in the extreme, but its greatest fault might be missing its own point.