A woman’s work is never done in Chantal Akerman’s icily deadpan, degree-zero movie from 1975, now on rerelease for its 50th anniversary. Over three hours and 20 minutes, from a sequence of fixed camera positions, it blankly transcribes the ordinary life of Jeanne Dielman, a fortysomething widowed single mother, living with her teenage son Sylvain in a modest one-bedroom apartment in central Brussels (he sleeps in a foldout sofa bed in the front room).
The flat is heavily furnished in a style that clearly dates from before the second world war, the glass-fronted dresser weirdly reflecting the flashing blue lights from the store across the street, a touch which the audience will come to notice in time and which may be a premonition of the police’s future arrival. The hours and the days go by, each like the last. Jeanne cooks, washes up, cleans, goes shopping, shines Sylvain’s shoes; sometimes she looks after a neighbour’s baby in a carrycot; she mends Sylvain’s jacket, fatefully leaving her dressmaking scissors in the bedroom. And in the afternoons, while he is out at school, Jeanne supplements the widow’s pension we see her collecting from the post office by having sex for money with gentlemen visitors who are discreetly attended to on a towel placed primly over the counterpane on what was once Jeanne’s marital bed. But her life and state of mind come to pieces – gradually, then suddenly – for reasons which we, the audience, have to supply.
Dielman is played by Delphine Seyrig, her son by Jan Decorte, and her clients by film-maker Henri Storck, critic and director Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and actor Yves Bical. This is also the 10th anniversary of something very grim. Akerman heartbreakingly took her own life in 2015 and never lived to see her work win the all-time best film poll run by the UK’s Sight and Sound magazine in 2022. Maybe that’s just as well. It triggered a certain amount of punching-up satire about out-of-touch elitist cinephilia, on account of this “greatest ever” prize that Akerman neither expected nor sought and might well have horrified her. Perhaps it’s only by forgetting about this gold medal that we can see the film clearly.
Jeanne Dielman’s secret life is not a secret. The truth is made quite clear at the very beginning of the film: a sad-faced, well-dressed man politely hands over money and leaves. And yet the film follows this with a real-time exposition of her day-to-day life of such sustained banality that we almost forget what we’ve just seen. It numbs us and we lose our sense of what was just happening, just as Jeanne has herself forgotten about it, over time. It is a surrealist effect. Bought sex in the afternoon is not dramatised or fetishised as it is in, say, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, and it doesn’t give us any insight into Jeanne’s mind. When we see her in the kitchen, wearing a dull housecoat and that permed hairdo immaculately in place, kneading minced beef for a dish at almost unfathomable length, she is in a housewifely trance. There is nothing very sensual about it. Perhaps she is the mound of minced beef in the hands of her customers. We never see her face in closeup, although it comes nearer to the camera in the final act, and we only glimpse her smiling briefly, and in profile, when she makes polite conversation with shop assistants.
What explicit guide there is to her life comes from a letter from her sister Fernande, who lives in Canada, which Jeanne reads aloud and which informs the audience Jeanne has been a widow for six years. The title – as well as naturally representing Jeanne’s placid bourgeois existence – is in fact Jeanne’s postal address, the words which Fernande will have written on the envelope. In a clothes shop, Jeanne will recount the story of when Fernande came to stay when Sylvain was just six years old and mother, father and son slept in the same bed. Another expository set piece comes when Sylvain, just before sleep, asks his mother about her sex life and confesses that a friend once told him sex was so painful for the woman that he would, as a child, fake bad dreams at night to rescue his mother from this ordeal. Jeanne is coolly disapproving of this, but tells him that his father’s ugliness was of no account: “Sleeping with him was just a detail.” Sleeping with these men is just a detail in the film as well.
But then, after the second man on the second day, it becomes more than a detail. Something happens in the bedroom. Jeanne becomes subtly discomposed: forgetful and in almost infinitesimal, but escalating disarray. Was there a moment of violence? Have Sylvain’s puberty and his newly impertinent and hurtful comments on sex suddenly opened Jeanne’s eyes to the truth? Or something else, something suggested by the director herself, that Jeanne is shocked by feeling pleasure, perhaps for the first time, and by the feelings of disloyalty to her late husband and disloyalty to her whole sense of self. Watching this again, I’m reminded of the brutal line from David Mamet’s 1991 movie Homicide: “It’s like the old whore says: ‘Once you start coming with the customers, it’s time to quit.’”
This is not the climactic truth about Jeanne. It is not that her sex work is the secret beneath her respectable image; it is perhaps more that her respectable image is the secret beneath the sex work. And when did Jeanne begin this sideline anyway? Presumably after her husband died; but not necessarily. It is not entirely out of the question that it started before her widowhood. The vision that she gives us of herself and her sister just after the war shows how transactional sex could be; her sister went with a GI and married him. As attractive young women they had that sexual capital and nothing else in the chaos of war. The wartime memories are very real; this film is much closer to the end of the war than it is to our present day. The framed photograph of Jeanne’s parents on the bedside table is another glacially sad touch.
From our 21st-century perspective, we can see how Akerman’s film has influenced Jaime Rosales’s The Hours of the Day from 2003 or Michael Haneke’s Hidden from 2005, although perhaps there aren’t many film-makers who can or wish to imitate it. The modern conversation around ASD and ADHD perhaps sheds a new diagnostic light on Jeanne’s behaviour and the film’s own procedure. The silence of Jeanne Dielman is the film’s weather and its atmosphere. It is a silence of terrible loneliness, and a silence in which a storm is gathering.
• Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is in UK and Irish cinemas from 7 February. A retrospective season, Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception, is at BFI Southbank until 18 March.
