Oct. 06--The comforts and terrors of daily life, and our most private interior landscapes, inform every moment of a film by the Belgian writer-director Chantal Akerman. With the cause yet to be confirmed, news Tuesday of her sudden death in Paris at age 65 came as a jolt as startling as the key moment, involving a newly washed spoon hitting a spotless kitchen floor, in the masterwork that brought her international attention.
The film, shot in 1975 and released in 1976: "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles."
It is a 201-minute chronicle, shot in calm, patient, wittily dispassionate style from low angles with a gathering sense of doom, of a middle-age widow played by Delphine Seyrig of "Last Year at Marienbad" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." Her life with her son is routinized beyond human limits. She cleans, she knits, she boils potatoes -- and, to make ends meet, she turns tricks. But this is not Catherine Deneuve in Luis Bunuel's "Belle du Jour." This is a defiantly female perspective, and Akerman's artful unraveling of this scenario, and this psyche, becomes a modern masterwork.
I saw "Jeanne Dielman" in the mid-1980s and have not been quite the same since. That's how it is with major film artists: Their visions become part of your subconscious. The moment Akerman's protagonist (whose behavior was inspired, in part, by her mother, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust) breaks stride and drops a spoon, it's like a lightning strike in the middle of a tiny Brussels apartment. Made when she was 25, with Akerman's head full of cinema's radical possibilities according to Jean-Luc Godard and others in the vanguard, "Jeanne Dielman" was a rare blend of exacting form and clean-burning content.
"I do think it's a feminist film," she once said, "because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images."
A visiting lecturer for City College of New York, Akerman was scheduled for retrospectives and tributes later this year in London and elsewhere. Early reports of Akerman's sudden death Tuesday referred to friends concerned about her health and well-being. Her most recent film festival appearance was a harsh one. At Locarno, Switzerland, last month, her video essay "No Home Movie" was met with boos and dismissals. The subject, her Auschwitz survivor mother, who died last year, was plainly personal. The film world can be cruel. Akerman charted her own interior landscapes to the last.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
