Jeanne Dielman is a resident of Brussels, who is raising a son alone. She is preoccupied with maintaining the home routine which starts to fail. A chamber structuralist epic about mundane life as the only format of being from one of the key filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century, Chantal Akerman.
Jeanne Dielman is a housewife and single mother whose days are scheduled by the hour and pass in an almost maniac schedule of housework and caring for a teenage son. When he is not at home, Jeanne meets with men. Her strictly regulated lifestyle is gradually getting out of control.
Shot at the age of 25, Jeanne Dielman was Chantal Akerman’s third full-length picture and remains one of the most significant twentieth-century films offering a novel look at female subjectivity, relations between the sexes, and the objective and social environment in which a person exits.
On an almost physical level, Akerman articulates the passage of time driven into the grip of everyday rituals and totally alienated from man. Regaining this time turns out to be possible only through a rebellion that violates the routine order. Akerman’s filigree work with duration and real time, objective environment and external uneventfulness have become the classics of minimalism in cinema and a paradigmatic example of a new type of suspense—the one inherent in the simplest actions and things.
The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Dir. Chantal Akerman
Belgium, France, 1975. 201 min. 18+
