The Mass Of Women Also Live Lives Of Quiet Desperation

Title: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Rating: 5 Stars

On the recently released Sight and Sound film survey, this was voted the number one film. Yes, this awkwardly titled film beat out the likes of Vertigo and Citizen Kane.

If I was to give you the film’s elevator speech, it would be something along the lines of a widowed woman raising her son takes up prostitution to make ends meet. All is well until one day, immediately after having sex, she murders her client by stabbing him in the neck with a pair of scissors (spoiler alert for a nearly 50 year old film).

If I were to tell you this summary, what would you think? Would you think that it must be some kind of action hero film where her client was abusing her and she bravely defended herself to keep her child safe? Or are you thinking that it must be a sensitive, psychological, sociological study of the choices that a woman must make when confronted with the very few choices that society has to offer a woman in distress?

Well, it’s none of those. What if I were to tell you that it’s a near three and a half hour film? That the entire film consists of long takes from a single shot camera? That the film only has five named characters (and I’m being generous when I say named, because three of the characters are named first client, second client, and third client and we only know Jeanne’s name because we hear her read a letter out loud to her son (the fifth character) from her sister)? That the film is nearly silent (the three clients might say twenty words collectively and with two exceptions that I can recall, Jeanne and her son Sylvain barely talk at all?

Does that sound like a nightmare cinematic experience? Well, I have to be honest, I was there for it.

The film takes place over three days. We pick up Jeanne in the afternoon on the first day, we spend the entire second day with her, and then we stay with her on the third day until the late afternoon when she murders her client.

When I say that there are long takes, I mean some seriously long takes. For example, when Jeanne and Sylvain eat the dinner that Jeanne has prepared, we see them eat the entire meal. There are no cutaways. We see them take every sip of their soup. We see them take every bite of their meat and potatoes. We see them clear away the table and put away their napkins. Nothing is left out.

The second day, after Jeanne burns the potatoes, we see her go out and get a second bag of potatoes. We see her peel the potatoes. We see her place the potatoes in the pot to cook. Again, no cutaways. One camera, fixed in place, witnesses every step.

It doesn’t stop there. When she does her dishes, we see her wash and dry every dish. In this case, her back is to the fixed single shot camera. Therefore, we don’t actually see her wash dishes. We watch her back as she does the dishes and then places each dish in the rack.

This is the film. Let me remind you. It runs for nearly three and a half hours. Are you thinking that someone would have to strap you down and pry your eyes open, ala Alex in Clockwork Orange style, to get you to watch the film?

Here’s the thing, if you go in understanding what’s about to happen, it actually works.

First of all, the fixed single camera watching a woman doing absolutely mundane tasks makes you feel voyeuristic. Honestly, there were times that I almost felt that I was a peeping tom. You are watching an actor do things that you never see on screen. The intimacy of watching this minutiae left me, at times, feeling uncomfortable.

You also begin to feel invested in these absolutely trivial actions. Since the actions on the screen are so minimally interesting, you find yourself becoming invested in them. On the third day, when I’m watching Jeanne wash dishes again, I notice that she places one dish on the cleaning tray that still has suds on them. I immediately started thinking, WTF? Is she going to let that stand? As odd as it sounds, I was actually relieved when, a minute or so later, she reached back, retrieved the plate, and rinsed it off.

I was relieved, because, as the film develops, it’s clear that all is not right with Jeanne Dielman. Her life is soul crushingly monotonous, repetitive, and isolated. She does the same things at the same place at the same time. Her three clients apparently show up at the same day and time every week. Her son, Sylvain, appears to be at least late teenage in years. He’s still in school but its not clear if it’s high school or university. Regardless, Sylvain is apparently helpless. Jeanne makes all of his meals, puts out his clothes for the next day, and even shines his shoes.

In the course of her day, Jeanne barely talks to anyone. She spends the bulk of her day alone in her apartment. Her only interactions are with the tradespeople that she shops with, a woman who drops her infant off for Jeanne to babysit while she runs some errands, and a couple of muttered comments to her clients. She makes a daily stop at a coffee shop, but sits alone. Sylvain and Jeanne barely speak. At the dinner table, Jeanne asks Sylvain to put down his book, but even after doing so, they barely speak.

By the third day, clearly things are going wrong with Jeanne. It’s more than just the burnt potatoes. At times, she sits in a chair in the apartment, clearly at a loss for what to do. She stands up momentarily to do some dusting but then sits back down again. She drinks coffee at home, but throws it out after a sip. She remakes the coffee (which we watch in full), takes another sip, and then throws it out. At her coffee shop, she doesn’t even take a sip. She just gets up and walks out.

Something is going on. With her third client, for the first time we watch Jeanne have sex. As it proceeds, she’s clearly experiencing something. Is it her first orgasm? Is it painful? The previous night, in one of their rare conversations, Sylvain frankly discusses sex with Jeanne. Sylvain’s friend compares the penis to the sword which makes Sylvain think that sex must be painful for the woman? In response, Jeanne just tells him not to worry about it. Did that conversation repeat in her head as she was having sex?

It’s not at all clear but almost immediately after the act is completed, as Jeanne is redressing, she grabs the scissors, walks over to the relaxing man and plunges the scissors into his throat. After she murders him, she moves to the dining table and sits there. For five minutes the film unblinkingly stares at her in that pose. This marks the end of the film.

As I was watching it, I kept thinking about the painter Edward Hopper. In paintings like Nighthawks, he painted the utter isolation of twentieth century existence. In many of his paintings, the figure is alone. In those which do have multiple figures, the figures do not look at each other and usually are at radically different angles to each other to highlight their relative isolation. To my eye, Jeanne Dielman even resembled a typical Hopper model.

I found myself amazed at Delphine Seyrig’s acting. She is essentially in every frame of the film. Not only that, but we see her acting in the most prosaic of settings. With such minimal action, every little choice that she makes has to be conscious. I learned something about Jeanne just by watching her eat. I learned more when I watch her do the dishes or even just sitting quietly in a chair. Any false move on her part would have destroyed the illusion. Seyrig completely inhabited the role of Jeanne.

This film is considered a feminist example of cinema. As I watching this, I thought of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Written in the early 1960s, it was a reaction to the then current thinking that a woman should be fulfilled by housework and children and not be bothered by concerns of the larger world. Here we see Jeanne slowly becoming suffocated by the tedium of her daily existence.

In many ways, this film is almost an anti-movie. Classified as Slow Cinema, the film dares you to be bored. The audacity of including a several minute scene of a woman washing dishes with her back turned to you (not just once but twice!) is breathtaking. Considering that film is popularly considered to be an escapist medium, to include such scenes is an act of rebellion.

Is it the greatest film ever made? To even pose the question shows its absurdity. After all, the number nine film on the list is the Man with a Movie Camera (I wrote about it here), a frenetic Russian silent film with no characters. How can you compare them? How do you compare Jeanne Dielman with Star Wars or the Marx Brother’s Duck Soup?

What’s important isn’t that it was ranked number one but that, by appearing on the list, I was inspired to watch it. Otherwise, I would never have stumbled on it. If nothing else, the Sight and Sound list has introduced to me a whole new set of films that might be of interest to me.