One of the real masterworks of modern cinema is Belgian and has the quite blunt title of JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES. Director Chantal Akerman was was only 25, in 1975, when she captured (with an all female crew) this three-hour-and-20-minute film about three days in the life of a widow, mother and prostitute. Akerman follows Jeanne Dielmans day to day rituals: washing, straightening, cooking and turning on and off the lights when she enters a room. Her son comes home, they have dinner, they take a walk, she puts on the radio and knits. But during the day she has gentleman in and turns tricks, leading to an inevitable crack in Jeanne’s facade. It’s both a structuralist triumph and a stunning indictment of society’s gender roles.

”Jeanne Dielman” has an extraordinary underground reputation, though it does recall the early films of Jean-Luc Godard as well as some of the work of structuralist film makers of the late 1960′s and 70′s, is not quite like any other film you’ve ever seen. It is a singular blend of feminism, modernism, and the avant-garde whose hypnotic rhythms and rigorous attention to detail make watching this masterpiece an unforgettable experience. The picture inverts normal filmic expectations by removing drama from emotional intensity and attaching it to extended daily routines.

With other words, ”Jeanne Dielman” is not a movie to see if you’re in a hurry to go somewhere else. It demands total attention. If one gives it anything less its revenge will be a boredom so complete it might be fatal. This extreme slow character study and one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time has been analysed and argued over for decades. The I Love Belgian Team found “Jean Dielman” to be an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, a real pearl worthwhile discovering.

© I Love Belgium

I LOVE BELGIUM

I LOVE BELGIUM

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