Chantal Ackerman's 1975 depiction of a few days in the life of a French widow, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, has been recently issued on DVD by Criterion Collection. The audience, as with many Criterion titles, will be quite limited. This is a work off extreme minimalism. The camera remains static as it captures the daily routine of the title character. As she goes about her mostly mundane activities, there is no score or narration. The dialogue, in French with optional English subtitles, is sparse. The film's running time of 201 minutes may try the patience of even the most open-minded viewer.
Then again, if given a fair chance, the viewer may get sucked in by the nearly hypnotic non-events that the movie so methodically details. Something about the utter lack of tension and drama in Jeanne Dielman's life manages to effectively stop the clock. This widow, and mother to a high school aged boy, happens to be a prostitute. She doesn't leave her house, rather every day a different gentleman arrives at her front door. She takes each customer into her bedroom and all the business is conducted behind a closed door. The viewer doesn't know, or really need to know, the details. Jeanne sets out a small towel on her bed, apparently to protect the sheets. All we are privy to is the sight of her going back to take the towel off her bed, eliminating any offending evidence. These activities occur while her son is at school.
There is no discernible emotion in any of the duties Jeanne performs throughout her day. Setting up the hide-a-bed in the living room for her son is approached with the same boredom as entertaining a john. Ackerman takes her time in staging these events, but nothing is given any particular emphasis over the other. Everything Jeanne is shown doing seems more or less like busy work. For the first hour or so I didn't notice the time passing, even though not much of any obvious significance was happening on screen. I have to admit, however, that as the running time dragged on I started getting increasingly restless. The main motivation to continue watching was the thought that something of consequence must inevitably happen. Eventually, quite late in the game, something fairly monumental does happen. Revealing the climax would be dirty pool, as it is arguably the only true payoff for spending three hours watching Jeanne Dielman live her crushingly routine life.
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