Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a 1975 film directed by Chantal Akerman and starring Delphine Seyrig. A landmark example of the slow cinema and slice-of-life genres, it is today also regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, with the film most notably topping Sight and Sound's critics' poll in 2022.
Plot[]
The film examines a widowed mother's regimented schedule of cooking, cleaning, mothering, and running errands over three days. The woman (whose name, Jeanne Dielman, is only discerned from the title and a letter she reads to her son) earns money by having sex with a different client each afternoon before her son arrives home from school. Like her other activities, Jeanne's prostitution is part of a mundane routine she performs daily by rote.
After a visit by a client on the second day, her orderly behaviour begins to subtly unravel. According to Chantal Akerman she had an orgasm, which destroyed her daily routine. However, this is neither shown nor hinted at on the screen. She overcooks potatoes while preparing dinner, then wanders around the apartment carrying the potato pot. She forgets to put the lid on the porcelain urn in which she keeps her money, forgets to turn off lights in the rooms she leaves, misses a button on her house coat, and drops a newly washed spoon. The alterations to Jeanne's routine continue until her client arrives on the third day. During sex she again has an orgasm, then dresses herself, walks back to the bed where her client is relaxing, and stabs him to death with a pair of scissors. She then sits quietly at her dining-room table.
Cast[]
- Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman
- Jan Decorte as Sylvain Dielman
- Henri Storck as the first client
- Jacques Doniol-Valcroze as the second client
- Yves Bical as the third client
- Chantal Akerman as the voice of a neighbour in the hallway
Production[]
After establishing herself as a major film director in 1974 with Je, tu, il, elle, Akerman said that she "felt ready to make a feature with more money" and applied for a grant from the Belgian government for financial support, submitting a script that Jane Clarke described as portraying "a rigorous regimen [constructed] around food ... and routine bought sex in the afternoon". This script would only be the rough basis for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles because after Akerman received the government grant of $120,000 ($701,224 in 2024) and began production, she threw the script out and began a new film instead. Akerman also explained that she was able to make a female-centric film because "at that point everybody was talking about women" and that it was "the right time".
Shooting Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles took five weeks and Akerman called it "a love film for my mother. It gives recognition to that kind of woman". Akerman used an all-female crew for the film, which she later said "didn't work that well – not because they were women but because I didn't choose them. It was enough just to be a woman to work on my film ... so the shooting was awful". Akerman further stated that the film is a reaction to "a hierarchy of images" in cinema that places a car accident or a kiss "higher in the hierarchy than washing up ... And it's not by accident, but relates to the place of woman in the social hierarchy ... Woman's work comes out of oppression and whatever comes out of oppression is more interesting. You have to be definite. You have to be".
The film depicts long moments of the life of Jeanne Dielman in real time, which Akerman said "was the only way to shoot the film – to avoid cutting the action in a hundred places, to look carefully and to be respectful. The framing was meant to respect her space, her, and her gestures within it". The long static shots ensure that the viewer "always knows where I am".
Reception[]
Initial release[]
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles premiered in the Directors' Fortnight of the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. It was initially met with mixed critical reception; many criticized it as a boring or meaningless exercise in minimalism, while others praised its visuals and use of time. The film's exposure and financial success in Europe helped Akerman to obtain funding for her 1978 film Les Rendez-vous d'Anna. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was not released in the United States until 1983.
Upon its release, critic Louis Marcorelles called it the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema". Jonathan Rosenbaum defended the film's length and pace, saying that it "needs its running time, for its subject is an epic one, and the overall sweep ... trains one to recognize and respond to fluctuations and nuances. If a radical cinema is something that goes to the roots of experience, this is at the very least a film that shows where and how some of these roots are buried". Critic Gary Indiana said that "Akerman's brilliance is her ability to keep the viewer fascinated by everything normally left out of movies". B. Ruby Rich said that "never before was the materiality of woman's time in the home rendered so viscerally ... She invents a new language capable of transmitting truths previously unspoken". Marsha Kinder called it "the best feature that I have ever seen made by a woman". Akerman was reluctant to be seen as a feminist filmmaker, stating that "I don't think woman's cinema exists".
Modern reception[]
The film has been characterized as an exemplar of the slow cinema genre, in which time is foregrounded and narrative action is downplayed. Critic Richard Brody called it a "tour de force of cinematic modernism [that] puts time onscreen as it was never seen before". Critic Jessica Winter wrote that "the film's strength derives in significant part from its austerity, patience, and extreme discipline", calling attention to its use of fixed shots, long takes, and absence of closeups or reaction shots. Winter asserted that "as the minutes and hours pass, Akerman rewards the viewer's attention by recalibrating it". In a 2009 essay, Ivone Marguilies observed that the film was "fully in tune" with the European women's movement of the time, and that feminist critics welcomed its "rigorous alignment of sexual/gender politics with a formal economy—showing cooking and hiding sex—... as an impressive alternative to well-intentioned but conventional political documentaries and features".
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has garnered a cult following and praise from the film community. Filmmakers Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and Céline Sciamma have drawn explicit influence from the film; Van Sant named it an inspiration for his own similar films Gerry and Elephant. The film has also been subject to spoofs and parodic versions. With the release of the DVD edition by The Criterion Collection in 2009, the company held a contest that invited fans to create cooking videos inspired by the film, and to post them on YouTube. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 55 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles offers a lingering, unvarnished, and ultimately mesmerizing look at one woman's existence." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 94 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Accolades[]
The film was named the 19th greatest film of the 20th century in a critics' poll conducted by The Village Voice in 2000. Rated 35th in the 2012 Sight & Sound "Greatest Films of All Time" critics' poll, and not rated in the top 100 of the 2012 directors' list, in 2022, the film was given the distinction of being voted as Sight & Sound's "greatest film of all time". The film ranked number 1 on the critics' poll, and tied for 4th place in the directors' poll. It is the fourth film to top the critics' poll after Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, and Vertigo, and the first directed by a woman to do so.