Akerman love

So as of last night I have a huge brain crush on Chantal Akerman. She's a Belgian director, and Emily and I went to see her movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) at Siskel. I guess it's not in wide release, but if you ever get a chance, you must see it. It's a meditation on boredom and routine with very little dialogue and even sound. The shots are long and stationary -- the camera is positioned as habitually as Jeanne herself, who goes through the patterns of her day so obsessively that you're shocked when, after watching her wash and dry and put away the silverware relentlessly slowly, she finally drops a spoon. The structure of the movie follows her through three days of her life -- she's a single mother who takes one client a day as a prostitute to support herself and her son, but the bulk of the film is concerned with her domestic routine, and sex stays off screen until the very end. So mostly you see her walking down the hallway, turning on the light in the bathroom, washing her hands, turning off the light in the bathroom, walking to the kitchen, turning on the light, putting the kettle on to boil, grinding coffee, pouring water through the filter, setting out bread and butter, going to wake her son, coming back into the kitchen, and so on. It sounds impossibly boring, and in a way it is, but it's also captivating, and it makes you as a viewer attached to her habits and the objects she uses so carefully (the thermos, the cubes of sugar). This means that when the habits start to come undone -- first she burns the potatoes, then dinner is late and everything starts to happen out of order -- you switch from this hypnotic vacancy (your state is just like hers, you realize) to mild distress, because you no longer have traction on what's going on. The transition the movie accomplishes at this point is impressive, because you move from feeling this vacancy to recognizing that you haven't had any idea all along what she's thinking; she's hardly spoken, and you've just been watching her wash dishes and fold and unfold the tablecloth for two hours now. And then the thought you have is that you don't know whether she feels nothing or whether she's entirely mad. At no point do you identify with her: you see her as a figure of domestic labor, and as a commentary on how housework can be like prostitution (or prostitution a form of housework), but you don't know what it's like for her. And the radical opacity you recognize towards the end, when she makes the first facial expressions of the film (which has been going on for three hours at this point) is all the more powerful in contrast to the peculiar thoughtlessness that the film forces you into initially. Visually it's a beautiful piece, a study in miniatures and interiors that shows you all the things Hollywood films don't, like an extended scene at the sink when her back is to you the entire time. Psychologically it's amazing: it produces a new kind of boredom, but more than that lulls you into a state where you find yourself finally surprised at how inaccessible someone else's experience is, even though you've just been (or so you think) feeling a version of it.