Lorna's Silence (2009)

I regard Luc and Jean-Pierre as two of the best directors of our times. Their films strike an ethical and social chord that never fail to engage me. This is the reason why my verdict of Lorna's Silence may be too harsh. I was disappointed, even though I was also aware of the many strengths of this film.

Lorna lives in an apartment with a heroin addict. She comes from Albania and now lives in Belgium on some sort of marriage-for-sale deal. She is dependent on gangsters. The transaction and the network of sinister-looking gangsters are only hinted at. We suspect there are shady things going on and that this is making the protagonist very scared. Soon, it gets clear that the drug addict is to be killed. Lorna knows about it, and she seems to think that she will marry another man, a Russian gangster get a passport and then get the possibility to be with her lover. She dreams of opening a café with her lover, leading a normal life. But soon enough she realizes what is about to happen - and the film follows her ethical response.

Like all of the Dardenne-movies, Lorna's silence introduces heavy and serious ethical questions, crystallized into hectic situations in which a person must act, must choose, must respond. The problem I had with this film is that the direction did not appear to be as tight as what I have experienced it to be in other movies of theirs. The world of the character is established meticulously, yes. But the focus of the film is sometimes a bit erratic, which makes my attention stray from the central existential concern: what does it mean to try not to care about another human being, to treat this person as just a means?

Lorna's silence is a claustrophobic movie. Many of the most important scenes take place in Lorna's small and shabby apartment - here, her relation with Claudy plays out. We see them, both trapped in their own lives. But there is also an external world which the film introduces: a seedy bar, the houses Lorna and her lover visit to scout for the perfect location for their café. These scenes come as a relief. This sense of relief is strengthened also in the very last couple of scenes, and here I think the Dardenne brothers really lose track of what they want to do. Without spoiling this ending, I found it ambiguous in a problematic way. The Dardennes, to me, are making movies that are clear, yet complicated. Lorna's silence, or at least its ending scene, is compromised by giving in to what to me appears as a rather desperate attempt to present something 'interesting' and 'mysterious'.

Mr Nobody (2009)

You may or may not remember Jaco van Dormael for the irresistible Toto, Le Heros. I remember that film as hiding its dark secrets in lots of inventiveness and imaginative twists. Mr. Nobody offers more of the same in that sense. Sadly, this movie is eaten up by its own imagination: it ends up being a loony thought experiment. The basic concept is that of multiple worlds. The film throws us from one world to the next, from one possibility to the next. More concretely: we see this guy, Nemo, living his life in several parallell worlds, one in which he spent his youth with his mother, one in which he spent these years with his father - and has a cutesy on-off thing with a girl called Anna, who is something his step-sister, or falls in love with Elise.  I am not sure whether the film should be interpret as some sort of cosmic joke, a light-hearted exercise in metaphysics or as a simple yet very complex story about a boy and his mother. The problem with the film is that I never care enough to pose this as a serious question. For all its fascinating and head-spinning turns, Mr Nobody never succeeds in enchanting me and hardly even in entertaining me.

La Promesse (1996)

La Promesse is one of the early feature films by the Belgian Dardenne brothers. Even so, their distinctive approach to cinema is here fully developed: their meticulous attention to locations and their emphasis on moral ambivalence is strongly present. The existential problems of the main characters are vividly evoked by describing their lived situation. Like few other directors (there is Bresson, of course), the Dardennes' sense of reality is primarily moral - and morality is not reduced to thin concepts of good/evil, right/wrong, but, rather, a plethora of perspectives of deceit, truth, friendship, trust, family and many others.

The protagonist, Igor is a teenager working for his father in a construction business, but he dreams of becoming a mechanic. The people his dad hires are illegal immigrants who live in a house nearby. Roger, the father, is described as a man who tries to earn money from this business, and he does not hesitate to demand high rents from the immigrants. Still, he is not depicted as greedy. We get the sense that he, too, belongs to the working class and tries to make ends meet. But this does not take the edge of his cruelty. One day, there is an accident. A man is killed on the construction site and governmental inspectors of the place are about to arrive. Before the man dies, he talks to Igor and makes him promise to look after his wife & kid. Father and son buries the man in cement, and keep quiet.

The 'promise' is the moral center of the film. What do we do when we promise? What kind of action is it, what makes a promise a promise? The kid continues to work for his father, who places many demands on him, but Igor also tries to help the wife of the dead man. I don't think it would be right to describe the boy as being torn between, for example, two principles or rules. It makes more sense to describe the relations between him and his father, along with the way he is haunted by his conscience. The father manipulates and exploits the workers, and his son longs for his affection, while also being abhorred by his cruelty. Igor simply cannot resist helping the woman. It makes a difference in what spirit the boy is doing this. It makes a difference for what we take the promise to be. We see him vacillate, and even try to send the wife away. He has not been able to tell her about the death of her husband, and is consequently complicit in lies about what has happened. Even when we see him and his father doing very horrible things, we look at this from the point of view of moral struggle. The confrontation between father and son is a climax of emotions and actions that, even though they might seem extra-ordinary, are rooted in familiar desperation.

If I would read the script for La Promesse I would perhaps find it overwrought, its story too constructed. The same thing can be said about many of the Dardennes' films, I suspect. Somehow, I never get this reaction when I watch their movies. They make me see the urgency in a specific moral situation, its different temporal stretches: we see the characters wrestling with choices and we also see in which way this is grounded in the past and in which ways it has implications for the open-ended future. The Dardennes situate their story in a socio-economic context but it should be said that this is no mere 'context'. Their reflections on class, poverty and exploitation is interwoven with the moral quandries. This is what I think make their films truly great: there is no division between 'characters' and 'surroundings' - these are organically linked in the moral universe of the film.

Two Days, One Night (2014)

The Dardenne brothers make movies that register a moral urgency. Their films tell stories that are a matter of life and death and this existential depth is rendered in a style that manages to be cinematic and 'realistic', realism never being degraded into a flawed or programmatic ideas about what social reality is like. Their film attend to what is real in a moral sense. The moral always has a primary position in their films. What characterizes their work and what Two Days, One Night really substantiates is a care for the characters expressed in the Dardennes' singular prowess of hinting at the complexity of a lived life.

The film starts with a dilemma. Sandra, who works in a solar cell plant, learns that her colleagues have voted about whether they are to give up the yearly bonus of € 1000, or whether they are to accept the bonus which would mean that Sandra is to be made redundant. The colleagues voted in favor of the bonus. Sandra's colleague urges their boss to re-arrange the voting next Monday, as the employees were given some information that biased their votes. The colleague encourages Sandra to contact the others who are to vote, and ask them not to vote in favor of the bonus. A journey of hope and humiliation ensues, as Sandra is visiting her colleagues, trying to convince them that she really needs to keep her job, even though she of course understands that they would like to keep the bonus. The Dardennes skillfully capture the variety of responses Sandra gets. The camera sticks close to Sandra, whose bodily presence is made painfully vivid. We see her nervousness, her tics and her oscillation between hope and despair. We learn that she has suffered from depression for some time, and now her husband is trying to stand by her side and to go through with visiting the colleagues.

The strain of the situation for everybody involved is perhaps what I found most engaging in this movie. The structural aspects of having a job and making a living is presented through the myriad of life situations people inhabit, with all it may implicate: having a loan to pay off, having a family to support, saving money for the kids' college education. But the structural is interspersed with the existential. Sandra encounters greed and people who are so ashamed of their clining to the bonus that they are not willing to talk to her. Sheepishly or rudely, they recoil. She also meets people who understand her and who make sacrifices so that Sandra can keep her position at the plant.

The cinematic brilliance of all this is that the viewer never knows beforehand what kind of response she will get. We follow her from door to door and every encounter reveals one human possibility, and the next one reveals another one. The emotional tensions within Sandra are coupled with the tensions of the encounter, and as we reach the end, one could say that the film celebrates the openness of such encounters. The structural tensions are not resolved, but they are actively dealt with and questioned by people who care about each other.

L'Enfant (2005)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have made several extremely good films that are characterized by a moral clear-sightedness. L'Enfant, like other Dadenne movies, has a rather everyday setting but from this setting, deep problems and questions arise. The main character, Bruno, has become a father. We see him together with his girlfriend Sonia. When he hears about the baby, he acts as if this is nothing to stir any trouble about. Bruno lives day by day, taking part in a number of petty crimes. One day Sonia tells him to watch the child. Bruno makes a deal with some people; he goes to an empty-seeming apartment and leaves the child there. In exchange, he gets a nice sum of money. So what is this, an episode of Oprah? The Dardenne brothers make movies about desperate people. Bruno is not only desperate, he is also cruel. Instead of passing judgment on him, L'Enfant makes us look at what he does. The camera follows him around and takes us to busy street-crossings, deserted houses and his mother's apartment to which he goes to ask her to lie to the police. I instantaneously care about these people, knowing next to nothing about them. I care because of the kind of attention to film directs at them.

The film is set in an industrial town. We sense that many people there are in Bruno's position. He is a young kid with nowhere to go. We see him with Sonia. They take shelter in a private world - a very fragile world. And we see this world shattered. Bruno tries to appear like to tough guy in charge of his life. The film shows in which ways this appearance is a lethal one. It does so without moralization. The Dardennes are not pointing fingers at poor people. Their film reveals a world. Like Bresson, there is a resolute sense of moral crisis here, but this is not a moral crisis where you are lead to say things like 'youth of today....' or 'these people should get a job....' L'Enfant is, as I see it, a film about what it is like to live with what one has done. There are no short-cuts on the map.  What I think separates the Dardennes' films from many others are their awareness of poverty as a wide, societal issue, an issue connected with the meaning of life and the everyday struggles of people who live in what is often represented as the margins of society. 'The margins of society' has become an expression so common and so thoughtlessly used that we seem all to familiar with it, even though we are not. The expression has become a cliché that often marks a certain distancing in how poverty is discussed. The Dardennes take us away from these clichés. Their films offer an unsparing confrontation with such detached clichés.

Home (2008)

Even though there are points of reference to other movies (some of Michael Haneke's early work, for example) in Ursula Meier's Home, it stands its own ground, it establishes a world of its own: a world which at the same time feels completely familiar and like it could have taken place on a distant galaxy. This is, I think, one reason why you should watch this movie. There are others as well.

A family lives next to a multi-lane freeway which is about to be opened. There are vast fields and throughout the film, the camera never strays from the close environment of the family (with one crucial exception). This makes for a very tight film about some very tightly knit people. They play together, dad goes to work, the teenager sunbathes under a gray sky and the two younger kids go to school. Their yard extends to the freeway and all kinds of belongings are scattered there. But the threat of the freeway looms over them. It begins with the asphalt, the workers. And then one day, cars speeds past their house (as the local radio celebrates the opening of the freeway) and the noise starts to get exceedingly intolerable. Home is one part sociological drama and one part horror movie. Like Todd Haynes' Safe, it places its complex of ideas within how people experience their surrounding world; the malaise they feel is placed within that experience. It may seem like a silly statement, but I think movies very rarely pay this close attention to experience (even though this is by no means a "realistic" movie) in the way Meier does. I mean, the entire subject of the movie is the main characters' relation to their lived environment (and that relation is intertwined with their relation to each other). This relation is captured in seemingly ordinary scenes (two kids running across a heavy trafficked freeway) and scenes that leave the ordinary, but still holds on to the level of experienced (it never transcends the family members' own perspective). The result is claustrophobic in an almost tactile sense; you can almost smell the asphalt and the traffic and your ears react to the noise. The basic question dealt with here is, of course: what is a home? Even though I have probably seen a hundred movies about people alienated from their home, people returning home, or people struggling for their homes, Meier approaches the theme from a rather unfamiliar angle, and her attempt is, I think, successful: she has made a movie about society, but also about where society comes to an end - in some ways, Home has the feel of a movie about the apocalypse.

The strength of the film is that Meier is not interested in explaining. Lots of things remain unclear. The focus is the tension within the family and how that tension is intertwined with the opening of the freeway. This tension is rendered in a geographical rather than psychological way. The film takes a look at places of solace, non-places, places that provide a sense of escape. All the time, the concept of place remains open-ended and fluid. This also ultimately means that the concept of 'home' takes on new meanings as the film progresses (and as the nightmare deepens).

To me, this film is an important reminder of what cinema can be, and how it can work with ordinary experiences through emotions that are elusive yet completely intelligible.

Agnès Godard, perhaps the best cinematographer working today, shot the movie and the images perfectly reflect the strange in-between land that we are invited into: a place where the fields stretch on forever and the landscapes are dressed in drab grays only to break into glimmering sunshine. The sparse choice of music is also excellent.

I, You, He, She (1974)

Even though it was a film I barely feel I could say anything intelligent about, Chantal Akerman's I, You, He, She turned out to be a quite haunting movie experience, even though the film's point partially eludes me (and many scenes seem unnecessary, especially in the beginning of the film where nudity is used in an extremely tiresome way). It starts with a girl (played by Akerman herself) in a room. The room is furnished with a mattress, a bureau and a chair. And a mirror. The girl has trapped herself in the room. As one scene ends and the next begins, a voice-over tells about the girl, but these are bare facts that we can see ourselves. The narration and the images are not as out of sync as they are in Marguerite Duras' India Song, but they are not altogether congruous either. It's an interesting technique that makes the whole thing full of tension. The girl shifts positions. She eats sugar. She writes a letter. She is trapped in the room. Then, suddenly - and within this film this is a dramatic turn of events - the girl leaves the apartment. We see a grim-looking junction (I've noticed a few Belgian directors' fondness for that type of ugliness - what's going on?). The girl is picked up by a truck-driver. They go to a bar, and they continue the journey. The truck-driver talks about his life. He is bored with his family, but at least he can meet a woman in his car whenever he feels like it. The girl gets out of the car. She knocks on a door, and is let into an apartment. We realize that the person who opens the door is her girlfriend. Although the girl is told she cannot stay, the two end up in bed. // The film is shot in gritty surroundings, using a sharp b/w palette. Sometimes the images are grainy. Like in Jeanne Dielman, actions typically play out in real time. It's harder to say anything about what the film tries to say. We see the girl doing almost everything compulsively (eating, writing, moving stuff around, drinking, having sex) and even when she is at rest, she looks restless. When she is in her department, she looks like a person who has decided to give up on the world. Time seems to have stopped, become irrelevant; days seem to go by, weeks even. Then she leaves (and it feels like a dramatic thing when she does), but inside that truck, or in the bar, she looks lost, and with the man, she does what she is told, and she is quiet, listening to the man's horrible story. She is not welcome at her girlfriend's place, but somehow, she is allowed to stay, and she does, eating sandwiches, being the one who is fed. How should this, along with the prolonged intimate scene, be interpreted?

According to Wikipedia, Akerman was upset when a gay film festival screened this film. Reportedly, she said that she would never allow any of her films to be shown on a gay film festival. Having seen I, You, He, She that declaration astounds me.

bullhead (2011)

Michaël R. Roskam's Bullhead explores the connection between masculinity and industrial breeding of animals. But even though the film takes a critical perspective on masculinity and the construction of masculinity there are some scenes that I would argue fall into the trap of male self-sentimentality, where being male in the non-conformist way is reduced to a form of tragedy. Despite being an interesting take on gender and animals, the problem with Bullhead is that it scoops to much material into a small film that would have required much more coherence and focus. The story wobbles unsteadily between the story of Jacky, pumped up guy whose innermost desire seems to be being a real man, and the story about the shady business of farming that he is involved in (the animals are pumped up as well, with illegal substances - in many telling scenes we see a resemblance between Jacky's physique and the cattle). It tries too hard to be a crimi-drama, without having the time to fully excavate the criminal underworld that it tells about. The film follows Jacky's attempt to understand his past and deal with his foes, but also on the level of psychological drama, there are some weak points (Jacky himself is a man of few words, mostly we see him making business deals or taking T, admiring his own bull-like body). We never see Jacky in his day-to-day work with the cattle. - - It is a tough film, and the image it conjures up of Belgium is not exactly beaming with a friendly light. Bullshead's Belgium: concrete, ugly roads, seedy clubs, industry, hard people, political hostilities.   

The Captive (2000)

Chantal Akerman made a Proust movie? I had to watch it (Jeanne Dielman is one of those movies I have on my mind all the time). I guess you will get something out of The Captive if you have actually read Proust, as some of the plot quite subtly hints at certain tensions that are not explored in the movie. Proust wrote two fat volumes about the catastrophy that was the relationship between jealous Marcel and 'secretive' Albertine. In the film, Albertine is Ariane and Marcel is Simone, but the theme is still there: poisonous jealousy. From the first few scenes onwards, we are thrown into the world of a stalker. But what does that stalker want?  What does he want from Ariane? Why is he so fixated with 'telling the truth'? Proust lets us into the world of this outrageous character, but he provides no comfortable psychological answers, and nor does the film. The film has a simple structure: the camera follows Simone in his pursuit of ... whatever. We see him walking restlessly around his big apartment, spying on his girlfriend and her friendds, interviewing people about Ariane's possible Vice. Even though Akerman doesn't follow Proust all the way (who could in a film like this?) The Captive still occupies a place pretty close to the text. I have to confess that this film did not blow my mind. Still, it was a good film about obsession - and a certain form of corrupted love where love is based on fantasy so that the only relationship the lover has is with a fantasy, not a human being. What made me a bit hesitant about how the film developed was that it made the 'mystery' of Ariane into a slightly different issue than in Proust's book. Did Akerman want to conjur up the image that we 'can never know one another, no matter how much we try'? If so, the film would fall flat. The big question is exactly what meaning it has to say that Simone/Marcel can not 'have' Ariane/Albertine.

The Kid with the Bike (2010)

Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne's new film is a gem. The Kid with a Bike stays true to the style the brothers have developed throughout their careers, but it still brings in a new sense of hope. As in most of the Dardenne films, moral questions are dealt with in a down-to-earth, yet unflinching way. Unlike most European contemporary indie directors, the Dardennes have no interest in mystification, in keeping things alluringly vague. In some sense, the cards are on the table, there is no "subtext", whatever the hell that would mean. The situation the Dardennes take an interest in are always somehow open-ended. But they rarely conjure up a sense of ambiguity.
 
In the first scene, we see a kid trying to make a telephone call. A bunch of adults do their best to convince him to hang up, that there will be no reply. But the kid is stubborn. That call has to be made. From the first minute onwards, every scene bristles with urgency. The kid runs around, the camera sticks closely to his movements. Early on, we understand that the kid lives in a foster home, and that he wants to get in touch with his father. By accident, the boy meets a woman, Samantha, who he adopts as his parent. The main themes of the film, relations between parents and children, responsibility for a child, is treated with the Dardenne's signature style: no hint of sentimentality, an understanding uf human beings as active. Their characters are often fighting against stifling surroundings, battling impossible situation, sometimes foolishly, sometimes rashly. The point is how the Dardennes manage to create very acute portraits of human life. Where most film directors focus on Big Decisions that have severe consequences and a painful background, the Dardenees more often set for the small-big situation in which people just act, in which things are constantly happening, in which people get disappointed, jaded, or in which their trust is expressed or in which trust is felt as a burden. During some moments, I was worried that the film gave a too romantic interpretation of Samantha. But in the end, I would not say that this is a film about Women being Responsible. Gender plays a very minor role in the relationship of Samantha and the boy. Or that is what I think.

One more thing about the way the Dardennes dodge sentimentality. In their earlier work, music has often been completely lacking. Here, we here a short snippet of Beethoven (I think) now and then. But it is only a snippet. Instead of tugging at the viewer's supposed heartstrings, this is more like a signal of an ending of a segment. A form of punctuation.

Khadak (2006)

Khadak boasts several nice scenes. It shows beautiful/horrifying pictures of the Mongolian steppe, run-down post-Soviet industry and small towns. Beyond these few scenes, Khadak is a mess consisting of heavy symbolism, overblown gestures and a muddled plot. Some things can be said for it: even though it attempts to portray a state of alienation, it doesn't rely on a romantic view of the rural life. What we see of life in and around the yortha, it is a life of hardships. The main characters' (he is a sheepherder) relationship to nature is visualized in a satisfactory way. For all these beautiful images, Khaled remains an insubstantial film. It uses too many clichés of art house cinema, such as forced repetition and details that are loaded with symbolism of which the viewer (at least not this one) has a very fuzzy grasp.

Rosetta (1999)

Asked about the focus of their cinema, the brothers once noted that when films have a working class subject matter they are labelled "social cinema", whereas films with bourgeois characters are referred to as "psychological dramas". (link)

Few contemporary film directors make movies with such moral depth as Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne. Their understanding of remorse/forgiveness/wrongdoing - but also their committment to depicting social injustice and poverty - is raw and unsentimental, yet very sober & clear-sighted. Rosetta is a case in point. If anybody else tried to make a film like this, it would easily turn into miserabilism and/or social pornography. The Dardennes' feet are nailed to the ground. They focus on things that nobody else cares about. They are not afraid of making political films. Many dislike what they do for that particular reason. To me, what is so admirable about the Dardennes as political film-makers is that they avoid showy resentment. Show/don't tell.

Rosetta lives in a trailer with her mother. They live by a busy roundabout. The roundabout, ironically, is called "Grand canyon". Obviously, Rosetta and her mother are very poor. The mother is an alcoholic. Rosetta tries to find work. In one of the first scenes, we see her being physically dragged out of a factory in which she worked but which won't give her any more work. Not because she did anything wrong. She is no longer needed there. Rosetta fights back. She insists. Two police officers carry her away. Her friend works in a waffle stand. She finds out the guy makes the waffles himself, thereby cheating his employer. Rosetta, desperate to find a job, rats on him. But of course she cannot live with having stolen his job like that, either.

There is almost no frame in this film that Rosetta is not in. The film stalks her around; she runs across a busy street, she runs through the woods, she is chased, she chases somebody else. Rosetta is not only a very bleak movie, its rawness is all over its cinematic technique. The film progesses in restless, anxious movement, of the main character and of the camera. We are not always sure what is going on (oh, she's fishing, that's what). As a matter of fact, most actions are tracked from over Rosetta's shoulder. It's a weird angle to shoot from, but of course there is a point about making the film in that way. There is a conservative dualism that the Dardennes break with. It has to do with how "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are normally put into pictures. Subjectivity is usually the point-of-view shot. We see what the character is defined to see. Objectivity, of course, is conventionally hinted at using long shots ("we see the whole scene"). The Dardennes fucks with these kinds of stereotypes. The peculiar visual style in Rosetta evokes a more complex point of view than crude definitions of subjectivity and objectivity. That everybody talks Bresson in relation to this movie is no surprise. Like Bresson, the Dardennes are interested in a very material dimension of moral reality. (I think that Simone Weil would have appreciated this film*.)

You may complain: but come on! The use of hand-held camera and the way it trades on "authenticity" is just as problematic! I would protest by saying that the point is not to depict the grimmest, waffle-snarfing place on earth and betoken it with Social Reality. The film seems much more ambitious. So where is the "inner life"? Well, it's all there: Rosetta's attempts to land a job is an example of capitalist reality as a psychological maze: a normal life / an unbearable situation / nothing makes sense, you do what you can / it is not the job that matters, but really, it is, or it isn't.

It's hard to describe what makes Rosetta special. Some have claimed it to be a gloomy evocation of social determinism. That interpretation is off, way off. Nor do the Dardennes dapple with something that some older film reviewers would call "European humanism", at least not if that label is to be understood as a elegiac bemourning of the human condition.  One thing that strikes me about their film (those I've seen, that is) is how observantly they register a very everyday sense of surrounding. In Rosetta, it's the roundabout, the myriad paths of the camping spot, drab corridors, the waffle stand. I have a very strong feeling that these things are not there as mood props, just to make it hit home: Rosetta is poor. Rather, by looking at the details of her surroundings, how she moves about there, what she does, what things limits her, we get to understand something about who she is and what kind of life she leads. Not only do Rosetta evoke embodied experience (wrestling on the grass, drinking a glass of water, listening to bad music, to give only three examples), but the film pays a very close attention to the surroundings as lived - and that is why the shabby look of the places hit so hard. I am repeating myself, but let me say it again: the Dardennes' approach is marked by a very un-dualistic tendency.

And that is one of the things I admire them for.

*BTW: Luc Dardenne studied philosophy!

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)

Really - right now, I should  watch no films more depressing than Pass it forward. But of course I do. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is not exactly the most optimistic film of film history. But it is one of the most ambitious films ever made. This piece of feminist experimental film-making revolves around a tightly knitted set of themes: work/labor, routines, time and space. Chantal Akerman, largely overlooked by the canonization-controlling, unhinged admirers of male crooks (did I say B---------, ok maybe I did), has made one of the most interesting films I have ever watched. Why is it so good? To answer that question, it is necessary to look into how Akerman works with images.

We follow Jeanne Dielman doing chores in her apartment, which she shares with her teenager son, and in shops and institutions in an anonymous-looking Brussels. We see her making beds, preparing dinner, cleaning the dishes and having mostly silent meals with her son (when she speaks, she reprimands him for reading while eating). These chores nonewithstanding, we get a glimpse into Jeanne's other job: once every day, while the potatoes are boiling on the stove, she receives a john. The film is divided into three days. During the first day, Jeanne's routines are new to us. During the last two days, we have already learned to discern patterns and moments of repetition. As the film spans 3 hours and 15 minutes, we are given some time to ruminate over these things.

It is this sense of repetition (but, as I will talk about later, ruptures) that is the heart of Jeanne Dielman.

Jeanne Dielman is a very restrained movie. All sounds are diegetic. If we hear a snippet of music, be sure it can be tracked to a radio. A large range of everyday sounds are heard; rushed steps, doors closing, the hum and odd screetch of kitchen machines, rattling dishes. In many scenes, we follow an action - almost always Jeanne's - in real time. Even the humdrum event such as peeling the skin off a potato is allowed the time to unravel without cuts. But Akerman does not work with long takes only. Sometimes the rhythm of takes follow the rhythm of the action portrayed (sitting down, silent) and in other cases a longish series of events are broken off with a sudden cut so that we really get only a blurry idea of what is really going on. Where are they going at night, Jeanne and her son? As others have pointed out, the rhythm of the film changes as the story changes. In some segments of the film, the abrupt cuts have an almost humoristic effect (I can tell you, this might be the only traceable element of humor here). Those particular scenes, of a claustrophobic hallway, lights constantly turned on and off, made me think of the great Resnais film Last Year in Marienbad, in which Delphine Seyrig (Jeanne Dielman) also acted (!). It is evident that Akerman is very interested in different notions of time and how time intersects with place and movement. The cinematography of Jeanne Dielman has nothing to do with a conventional sense of "conveying information" (what is 'information' anyway?, and so on).

The camera work enhances the detached style of the film. Almost all frames are long shots, the camera resolutely motioneless. If you hadn't guessed it already, what you may mistake as a shoddy "place the camera and SHOOT" reveals a stern sense of composition (just look at how Akerman plays with the reflection of a blue neon sign on the living room wall - esp. in the last ten minutes of the film. As the kids are prone to say, OMG!).

As in the early films of Michael Haneke (who was perhaps inspired by Akerman?) we see a minimum of emotional expression. For a while, this tempted me into dualist thinking: what's going on inside them? But of course, that leads us on the wrong track. I would say that if we are to take films like Akerman's seriously, we must somehow agree to seeing everything as taking place on the surface. That's not behaviorism (cf. Wittgenstein). Rather, Akerman challengus the viewer to scrutinize minute details of expression. With the long takes of everyday routines and short takes of Jeanne's running from room to room, working through her day as a housewife (what's up with on/off thing with lamps?), the film poses a question, what role do the routines have in Jeanne's life? What do we see of her in them? Or, more importantly, what does she become in them? 

As I said, the viewer gradually sees patterns in Jeanne's routines. During the second and third day, something is changed. There are small lapses and mistakes. She washes one plate, puts it into the rack, changes her mind, and re-washes it. She drops something on the floor. A shop is closed. The coffee is bad. In all this, it is as if the stern logic of her existence reveals some subtle cracks, only to be completely disrupted when Jeanne, to our horror and surprise, kills one of her johns. Life will not return to normal. At the last segment of the film, Jeanne is sitting in the living room, quiet. The only thing that moves is the reflection of the neon light. 

The denouement of the film isn't restricted to shock value. It calls for re-watching and re-thinking. What did I see earlier on? How did I view Jeanne? What happens in the film and what kind of change - is it a change - does she undergo? In most films, the role of change is very obvious: a "character" is built and gradually develops through what s/he experiences. In Akerman's film, change is a question mark. It is not a shallow one, either (it has to do with what it means to perceive somebody as having changed).
It is possible to interpret this film in fairly conventional ways (taking account of some strands of /radical/ feminism in the seventies): Jeanne is the typical housewife, trapped in a life as a Woman, trapped in an apartment, confined to the execution of mundane routines. But there is reason to believe matters are not quite that simple. Akerman has no vision of "another life". As my friend says, she does not portray Jeanne as a misunderstood artist who is not given to chance to express her creative spirit. One could, instead, say that Akerman takes a deeper look a domestic space. Space, for Akerman, is not just rooms inhabited by human beings, chairs and perhaps a set of crockery. Space is portrayed as an order (or perhaps dis-order) of things. In this sense, space is not just something that in different ways makes things possible or impossible in a physical (or metaphorical) sense. Here's the thing: we see Jeanne's apartment, her furniture, the lamps, the radio, in connection with what Jeanne does, in connection with her routines and almost-theatrical performance of habits. In the beginning of the film, Jeanne seems to be master of the space (despite and because of her feminine role). She runs from room to room, she makes things happen in an orderly way. There are no unforeseen events. And, then, something has gone askew. Jeanne's apartment is no longer the space of uninterrupted routines. Chance - and, later on, - action come to the fore. (Maybe I should put the blame on Akerman, but you see how it is; I am totally overpowered by Arendtian conceptualizations!)

I would say that habits and routines are understood in a more complex manner in Akerman's film than, for example, in Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent. Haneke (in my opinion) seems to have relied on the notion of an underlying dread beneath the safe pattern of familial- and work relations. (Really, I should watch the film again to have more back-up for saying this.) But as I said, I am very unhappy with saying that there's any "beneath" in Akerman's film (or?). Routines are not rendered with the simple meaning of being "mundane" ("but she could be so much more..."). Jeanne's routines are her life. Throughout the film, the viewer battles the question of what this life is about; what meaning it has (and what is this question?). More and more, I am inclined to talk about Jeanne's routinized life as a sort of compulsion that is not only external (the concrete chores normally expected of the housewife) but also something Jeanne strives to impose on the world. Why? That is a question that haunts me throughout the film.

Akerman's study can be read on quite a few levels; as a study of ethnography, as social critique, psycho-analysis, feminism - even a sort of phenomenology of habits. I would say Haneke does not have an eye that is as compellingly observant as Akerman's.

END NOTE: A large part of the staff that worked on this film is female.

Toto the Hero (1991)

Toto the Hero ranks quite high on the weirdness ranking list, but is it an interesting film? No. Or, maybe it could have been, had Jaco van Dormael had a clearer vision of what he wanted to do. As I see it, Toto the Hero is a film about bitterness. We see an old man, Thomas, making plans to kill the man, his childhood neighbor, who he thinks lived the life he should have had. In flashbacks, we see Thomas as a child, in love with his sister, and as an adult, still in love with his sister. Thomas is convinced he is a nobody. He is certain that his life is stolen by his neighbor. It turns out that his childhood friend thinks the same about himself. van Dormael works with a quite special visual style, popularized later on in films like Amélie and Eternal sunshine on a spotless mind. He tries to evoke the borders of fantasy and memory, and how these are permeated with desire and loss. In style, this reminds one of a musical, but in content, it is utterly depressing. If nothing else, what you remember (for days / weeks / years) from this film is the song "Boum" by Charles Trenet. Another funny thing about this movie is that the "bad guy" is called Kant.
It's interesting to reflect on how story is played out. How are we to perceive Thomas? To me, he is less the man who has gotten hard blows from life than he is the man who, engrossed in bitterness, does not see anything as possible; he will always be the nobody. That comes to be seen as an almost metaphysical fact about his life, that nothing will or could change. van Dormael is actually trying to capture a delusional perspective. I would say he succeeds quite well, even though I must say I didn't really care for the film (which was, however, more interesting upon second viewing than when I first saw it maybe 10 years ago).