Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

1662 Broadway Boulevard,Kansas City MO 64108

22 January, 2023

Description

Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) is a mother haunted by her daily chores, work, and caretaking. Exhaustion builds in real-time as Dielman inches toward a broken finish line. Director Chantal Akerman’s quietly sadistic meditation on domestic doom is a feminist classic. A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.