JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975) - 4/18/2024
How would a day in your life look?
This film is not one that I would personally have sought out if it were not atop the BFI’s most recent list of greatest films of all time. I won’t go into the nuance of it because it’s been done by people who revere it in a better light and give an in depth personal history of Akerman’s film better than I could, which you could and should read here. I will say though, that while being unemployed, this film hits a lot different.
To say it is boring is reductive, but not incorrect, as that is the essential premise of the three and a half hour film. We are shown the monotonous and continuous day of Jeanne living her life at home over three days, the chores she does in real time, and the trick she turns on each one of those days. I didn’t know what the idea of this film was, but then when I looked it up after about an hour and a half in, I was expecting it to be more akin to Belle du Jour or Working Girls. It is neither of those. It was just a very slow, tedious, patient, and exacting film.
The only real comparison I thought of was with The Zone of Interest (I saw part of Jeanne Dielman prior to Zone, so that thought happened prior to going back and rewatching this film). How they both just follow the daily life of two people in a very boring manner, but how everything is cut in such a stringent way. Everytime someone turns off a light, every time someone moves from one room to the next, it is cut hard from one still frame to the next. Everything in life, seemingly, is mundane.
So, if we were to follow me around during a normal, unexciting day, it would be something like this:
5:25 - wakeup for gym, get ready, leave
5:34 - drive to gym
5:45-7:05 - be at gym, workout
7:20 - come back home, shower, sleep
9:30 - wake up, make bed, make breakfast
10:05 - do this stupid blogging thing I decided to do this year
11-2 - lay around, read, watch stuff on TV
2 - eat lunch
3-5:30 - same as before
5:35 - Ash comes home, watch more stuff
6:30 - make dinner
7:30 watch more stuff
10:30 go to bed
Life is boring and tedious and repetitive.