‘People stood up and started to yell,” says Aurore Clément, remembering the day Les Rendez-vous d’Anna premiered at the Paris film festival and caused havoc. This glacial, disquieting film, which appeared in English as Meetings With Anna, follows the titular director on an odyssey around Europe that climaxes with her singing an Edith Piaf song to her lover. And that, apparently, was the final straw. “They wanted to attack me,” says Clément, who played Anna. “The journalist sitting next to me put his trenchcoat over me and got me out of there.”
The film was the third feature from Chantal Akerman, who loosely based Anna on herself. It was undoubtedly a challenging, elusive film – a series of haunted confessions heard by this film-maker protagonist from lovers, family and wayfarers while on her travels promoting an unknown work. Anna’s existential solitude, her refusal to remake herself for her lovers, was quietly radical. “People weren’t ready to accept it at the time, its feminism,” says Clément of the film, which was released in 1978. “Society was still very closed, women didn’t have much say.”
Nearly 50 years on, audiences seem finally ready to embrace it. Meetings With Anna is part of a major retrospective of Akerman’s work at the BFI in London, recognition that follows on the heels of her 1975 masterpiece – Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – being voted the greatest film ever by Sight and Sound magazine. A formalistic masterstroke that expanded cinematic notions of time, the film made watching the daily chores of a Brussels housewife for over three hours utterly hypnotic.
Meetings With Anna is as much about absence as presence: its import presses in unseen from the outside, as with The Zone of Interest. A malaise, a sense of history and inheritance weighing on ordinary life, hangs over all of Anna’s conversations. “Three things,” specifies Clément, her blue-green eyes gazing at me from under a side-swept blond fringe. “It’s Europe, it’s the mother, and the Shoah.”
We’re sitting in the study of her apartment in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, warmly lamp-lit against the dreary February afternoon outside. Clément, now 79, ushers me in like an old friend, bemoaning the Trumpian state of world affairs, slender and curtly chic in a checked dress, blue cardigan and pearl earrings. Scattered everywhere are sketches and paintings, and a beautiful ceiling mobile made by her husband, Dean Tavoularis, Francis Ford Coppola’s longtime production designer. She met him while filming Apocalypse Now, in which she had the role of an opium-proffering soldier’s widow.
Not only did Clément play a version of Akerman in Meetings With Anna, she also played a version of the woman for whom Akerman had a “terrifying love”: her mother, who had survived Auschwitz. The mother character was called Catherine and Clément appeared as her in Akerman’s 2004 comedy, Demain On Déménage, or Tomorrow We Move, about the claustrophobic cohabitation of a mother and daughter. In fact, they made five features and several shorts together, even though Akerman initially thought Clément – this solemn, ethereal beauty – was too pretty to play Anna, only to return a year later to offer her the role.
Clément became part of Akerman’s extended family, with whom she “danced, ate, laughed, drank, joked, all the time”. Popping a Freedent mint, the actor says she can’t explain the magic. “Chantal and I, it just happened all by itself, without us saying, ‘We’re going to work together for our whole lives.’ It was great.”
“Pas de psychologie!” were Akerman’s watchwords for Clément. “No psychology!” She encouraged the actor instead to pay scrupulous attention to Anna’s appearance and gestures, starting with high heels they trawled through over 30 shops to find. The pair in question certainly hit the mark. “She said the sound of the heels was the sound of Germany,” recalls Clément. “She didn’t have to say more.”
Working with Akerman meant acquiescing to a fastidiousness that extended to dialogue, which would be honed “down to the semicolon”. This was an echo of the control exhibited by the director’s mother, who inspired the title character’s exhaustive domestic regime in that 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielmann. Clément was only too happy to submit. “I saw very well where she was going. If she was happy and said, ‘This is it’, then that was it. She was the one who was right.”
Maybe this obstinacy, this refusal to yield to the audience by having Anna finally and candidly reveal her interior life in the conventional dramatic way, was what unleashed the anger at that Paris premiere. Clément corrects me: “Anna holds everything in, but she’s not waiting to reveal anything. She’s already elsewhere. Elsewhere.”
Clément shared Akerman’s fiercely prized independence. The actor grew up in grinding poverty, the daughter of two farm workers in the Aisne region, to the north-east of Paris. “A childhood of total solitude, no friends, no girlfriends,” she says. “Shut inside, sewing. No books, nothing.” When she was 17, her father died of cancer in her arms. She got a job at the sugar distillery he had worked at, to provide for her disabled mother, and her sister, who died three years later after an ectopic pregnancy.
“That was the profound sorrow that led me to this,” she says, gesturing around her apartment, which is adorned with a lifetime of art and literature. At the age of 20, Clément drove to Paris, armed with books about Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe for inspiration. She points them out on the shelves. This young woman made for the prestigious Catherine Harlé modelling agency and announced that she wanted to do shoots for the likes of Vogue and Elle. Also waiting in the room were three statuesque models. An agent told her: “Don’t even think about it, my dear. Look at them, then look at yourself.”
Yet, by the early 1970s, Clément was a regular on magazine covers. When director Louis Malle saw her on the front of Elle, he thought she might be right for his 1974 war film Lacombe, Lucien, about a young French boy who finds himself in the clutches of the Gestapo during Germany’s occupation. Clément got the part in the end by demanding Malle stop dilly-dallying. “I wanted to portray myself as I wanted to be,” she says. “And if you didn’t want me, I left.”
This uncompromising stance allowed her to escape the worn grooves of the French industry for eye-catching roles: she would later appear as Anne Henderson in Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas; as the Duchess of Chartres in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette; and as Mireille in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash. As for Apocalypse Now, she was marooned for weeks in the Philippines amid Coppola’s meltdown, only to see her role cut, although it was reinstated for 2001’s Redux version.
When Clément moved to Los Angeles to be with Tavoularis, leaving the director Miloš Forman, the Coppola family took her under their wing. She became friends with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, smuggling bananas on to the set of Apocalypse Now for the latter, who was under orders to lose weight. There was as much hard graft, she recalls, as drug-addled lost weekends: “There was craziness, but not just that. There was gigantic work to be accomplished – and I’m thinking of Dean there, leaving at 5am to build sets. People didn’t mess around.”
Akerman killed herself in 2015. Clément has never learned the details. Akerman had bipolar disorder, and had been depressed since her mother’s death the previous year. The two had been due to meet in Paris. Clément waited for an hour and a half, but Akerman never showed. “Everyone’s still stunned she’s not here,” she says. “Like everything you lose in life, it’s hard to explain.”
Now, 10 years on, Clément is working to maintain her legacy. On the table in front of us are boxes spilling over with Akerman’s papers, heavily edited and annotated by the actor for readings in Paris and her native Brussels. Going over all this old ground has been tough. “I’m worn out,” she says, “but it’s more an interior fatigue. It’s made me remember stuff. You have to stop after a given point.”
Although Clément and Tavoularis live in Paris now, they are still in motion in their minds and ever busy. While we’re talking, a courier delivers a new script Clément’s been waiting for. As we finish up, she makes a call to “Deanie” to announce our imminent arrival at the 92-year-old’s nearby studio, to help him walk back up to the apartment. Stooped and bespectacled, the man who built Don Corleone’s study in The Godfather and Kurtz’s temple in Apocalypse Now seems nonplussed by the invasion. Surrounded by stacks of pop-artish canvases, he is clearly hard at it.
“You see,” says Clément, gesturing all around. “We’re working! We’re working!”
• Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception is at the BFI Southbank, London, until 18 March. A Blu-ray box set, Chantal Akerman: Volume 1, 1967-1978, is out on 24 February
