Review - 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Comerce Quay, 1080 Brussels'

This film by Chantal Ackerman is now routinely voted the best, most perfectly made, film of all time by 21st century film critics including those in 'Time Out' who have finally replaced their choice of Orson Welles' 1941 film 'Citizen Kane' with this title. For many decades, 'Citizen Kane' was recognised as advanced not just for its time, but for all time. But whilst the camera work and set design were dazzling in their complexity for a monochrome film, the script was eventually seen as 'severely clunky' at best, to somewhere between 'of it's time' and 'irredeemable' at worst. That is the point about films-when the set design, the acting and script are all edited and cut together to their best possible effect, the final cut is where the faults are fixed for as long as film exists waiting for critics to pronounce on them. 

The back story behind the making of 'Citizen Kane' was once part of what made the film so admired. But the myth/backstory of how the film was the one part of the film that was going to shift with time. The story of how the film was made, on-the-fly with a relatively low  budget by a first first time film director, but with an effect that produced an extraordinary sheen, where the distribution of 'Citizen Kane' was so mired in media and film company politics that in box office was where was where 'the film failed' and cemented Welles reputation as the wayward genius. Even the best myths wear out and can't be renewed. From early in the 21st century onward another film was bound to be chosen as 'best film ever made'.

I have been sitting on my thoughts for over a week since seeing the 1975 film 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Comerce Quay, 1080 Brussels', the three hour epic that knowing just a little about it, I thought I needed the big screen away from home for me to appreciate it properly. It is an amazing film, amazing for compressing such a complex and dark narrative-the everyday depression of a 1950s Belgian sex worker-into such a tight script-over 98% of which is non-verbal. The film passes The Bechdel Test, but only just-so all consuming is the silence in the flat that Jeanne Dielman lives in. In an alternative film awards there would be an award for 'wallpaper of the year in a film', perhaps stretched to 'set design of the year'. Ideally sponsored by a brave wallpaper company. This film would have won the award for wallpaper of the year in 1975 it being a subtle satin effect in a neutral blue/grey tone with a relief effect of diamonds on it-you would not want it as the screen wallpaper on your laptop. With its hospital blue/grey tones this wallpaper was even more the star of the film than the actress Delphine Seyrig who threw her energies into the routines of housework that she undertook whilst the camera never moved after assuming different fixed positions in different rooms for what were more than long takes. The stillness of the camera in the confined space became a statement, part of the script. 

But this is not the first opaquely scripted, unfathomable, film that actress Delphine Seyrig starred in. She was credited in a film I watched in the days of video cassettes 'Last Year at Marienbad' (1961) which is available to watch online for free here. Be warned this film is opaque enough for it to not matter whether you are watching it with subtitles or without. The film is rich in atmosphere, the camera gliding slowly across the ceilings of some luxury house, to the sound of ever ascending in pitch organ music with an off screen narrator speaking, sometimes nearer muttering, in French. Where the film is short on explainable plot and clear narrative the ambience of the film absorbs the viewer instead. 'Rumour of a murder' might have been as near as there was to a summary of the plot. 

There must be a whole sub genre of films that present opaque surfaces and resist interpretation that are more than 'slow cinema', slow as they are-but are a category on their own. For an alternative view of 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Comerce Quay, 1080 Brussels'. please left click here.