Superb new print of Chantal Akerman’s legendary avant-garde masterpiece which locates the dread behind the monotonous routine of a housewife and part-time prostitute. “A slow-motion thriller.” — Time Out NY
Labels are inadequate, but they fall away in the face of this severe yet majestic movie.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2009
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975
Chantal Akerman was 25 when she made this avant-garde landmark, shown here in a superb new 35mm print. It remains a potent expression of the feminist, anti-bourgeois spirit of the 70s and an astonishing appropriation of the tools of commercial cinema to concentrate, with mesmerising effect, on the ordinary. We watch the monotonous daily life of a Brussels single mother, housewife, and part-time prostitute – played by the sphinx-like Delphine Seyrig. And we watch with mounting dread as cracks appear in her apparently purposeful routine. — BG
“A brilliant example of maximal minimalism that fuses viewer with subject so profoundly, the marathon experience transcends simple spectatorship... its statements about the human condition, about its fears and its frailties and its veneer of convention over a cauldron of regret and self-denial, are as universal and timeless as Greek tragedy.” — Stephen Garrett, Time Out NY