Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Dacorte
Runtime: 202 minutes

Synopsis: A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. However, something happens that changes her safe routine.

Verdict: On paper, “Jeanne Dielman” sounds like a cinephile’s worst nightmare. It’s a three and a half hours long feature entirely captured using a static camera, a multitude of long shots, minimal cuts, no musical score, and no proper narrative. It’s almost as if legendary Belgian director Chantal Akerman approached a random middle-aged woman on the streets and asked for her permission to record her life over the following three days. For 200 minutes, we passively watch the titular character - a widower who occasionally provides sexual favors for a limited number of clients to make ends meet for her and her teenage son - cook, clean her belongings, go grocery shopping, get ready for bed, and a few other mundane chores we all do on a near-daily basis. It’s a movie that will test the patience of many, one that will leave many viewers perplexed as to what the goal of it is. Even I was nervous going into it that I’d endlessly pause it out of boredom and that it would take me ages to finish it.

But, to my surprise, I couldn’t take my eyes of “Jeanne Dielman”. Akerman truly crafted a miracle of a movie that beautifully deconstructs the dull and repetitive nature of the lonely housewife life. It’s an unconventional epic that understands that in order to achieve its objective, it had to strongly rely on an ultra-realistic approach materialized by a lack of creative input. In other words, it was Jeanne’s movie, not Chantal’s. We were merely eyes on the walls of her apartment, dissecting every unfiltered decision she was making without being allowed to take any shortcuts. We eventually stop viewing the film from a third-person perspective and start experiencing it through the protagonist’s point of view, ultimately leading to a shocking but earned finale that will haunt us for a very long time.

Jeanne Dielman owes her life not only to Akerman’s sincere directing but also to Delphine Seyrig’s flawless acting, perhaps one of the best of all time. The movie, released in 1975, is a daring and nuanced creation that is nothing short of a masterpiece on the avant-garde scene. It certainly isn’t for everybody but if the concept doesn’t intimidate you, I urge you to give it a shot.

FINAL GRADE: 9/10