Jeanne Dielman Review Revisted

It’s funny what kind of blog posts get a reaction. I’ve been writing essays for sixteen years now, and most don’t inspire any written comments at all despite my website getting upwards of thirty thousand hits a year. But there’s one post of mine that keeps getting responses: a blog from December of 2022, when I offered my opinion about the 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, as it had just been declared the greatest film of all-time by the British film magazine Sight and Sound. This declaration prompted me to watch it, and while I noted some of its attributes, I mostly scratched my head about the behavior of the protagonist of the film, questioning whether the fictionalized account of a single mother in Brussels was really representative of the broader experience of women everywhere, as the film is celebrated to be.

A few responses agreed with my take, liking the film even less than I did:

“Four hours of my life I will never get back. I wasn’t alone in finding it ludicrous – around 12 of the fortyish (in the) audience walked out, with over half leaving during the utterly callous crying babe scene.”

One commented that “The mother is appalling. She is like a shell, a zombie.”

But other disagreed: “This is cinema at its finest, leaving us with much to wonder and talk about.”

This is an important point, because any film that makes you think and leaves you with something to chew on is a worthy watch. That’s what good art does, so in that sense, I’m really glad I watched Jeanne Dielman.

A few responders were quite taken aback by my negative impression of the lead character and decided to go low:

“This is genuinely such a braindead review…You’re looking at a movie about a woman who has been stretched so thin she has no real time for herself, she doesn’t live for herself, she’s constantly working for no pay (yes, homemaking is labour), so of course she has no more energy for the emotional labour of taking care of a child.”

And then another wrote:

“A rather pointless review. You have clearly misunderstood Jeanne Dielman and instead of reading a lick of feminist theory or others’ interpretations of the film, you have decided to instead to declare that you were rather watch ‘Goodfellas’ and other male-directed movies. Very original.”

I found both of these comments ironic, because they made assumptions about me that could be categorized as “braindead” or “pointless.” There’s an inherent assumption behind the words, “Yes, homemaking is labour,” as it implies that I don’t view it as such. I do. I do with a degree of authority on the matter because I did it for twenty-three years, probably longer than the person making the point. Despite working hard at parenting, I found joy in the daily grind and in seeing my kids grow, something Jeanne Dielman was unable to do.

Then there was the assumption that I hadn’t read others’ interpretations of the film. Not true. Not only did I mention reading reviews in my original essay - something the reader clearly overlooked - those reviews are what prompted me to write my own review in the first place. I simply don’t agree that the film is a universal depiction of oppressed women, and I certainly don’t agree that I should have to read books on feminist theory to draw a conclusion about a film that should stand on its own merit.

My mother was a single mom for seven years, raising me and my siblings (note: not just one teenage son as in the film) and was in roughly the same position as Jeanne Dielman, but that’s where the similarities end. My mom worked hard, kept a steady job, laughed, dated, played tennis and cards with friends, cooked and arranged home repairs. It was difficult. It was exhausting. But she still lived her life to the fullest.

This is the lens through which I viewed the movie. Others undoubtedly view it through different lenses. That’s okay. People from different backgrounds and different experiences can view things differently, but it doesn’t mean that any of our opinions are “braindead” or “pointless.” It just means that they’re different.

I do wish more of my blogs inspired readers to comment – I find it illuminating, even when they get a bit personal. But kudos to a film that’s still being talked about fifty-plus years after it was released.

I just never want to see it again.

Jeanne Dielman: a Film Review

You may have recently heard about the 1975 movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, as it was declared the greatest film of all-time by the esteemed British film magazine Sight and Sound, a slot formerly held by Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo and the 1941 Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. Jeanne Dielman may be unfamiliar to many movie lovers, as it was for me, and despite it running over 200 minutes, I felt compelled to give it a viewing last week (it’s currently streaming on HBO Max and Prime). It was directed by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman who died by her own hand in 2015 at age 65, but not before dedicating her life to portraying women’s lives through dozens of feature films, short films and documentaries. And indeed, Jeanne Dielman, which Akerman directed at age 25, is astounding if for no other reason that it’s almost exclusively about a woman (played by Delphine Seyrig) doing household chores, not the stuff of most cinema, especially in 1975. The movie is almost universally praised by critics and has even garnered an audience approval rating of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too shabby for a long film with little plot.

But if I’m being honest, I found the film to be a slog. I know, it’s supposed to be a slog, as it depicts a widowed housewife whose days are spent doing menial tasks such as peeling potatoes, running errands, dusting chotchkies and preparing meals for her teenage son, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the slog is worth it.

According to some of the contemporaneous and modern reviews I’ve read, the film is meant to portray the oppressive nature of women’s existence, which boils down to serving men, whether they’re husbands, sons, bosses and – in Jeanne Dielman’s case – clients who pay to have sex with her, a different man visiting her apartment each afternoon. And look, if the film is meant to capture three days in the life of one particular woman who’s clearly suffering from depression, then okay. I can buy the premise and its conclusion, but that doesn’t mean I particularly like it, that I wasn’t bored when the main character peeled potatoes for not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, but for eight minutes, or that I’ll ever watch it again, but okay. The film is completely unique. The subject matter is completely unique. And the artistry of the framing and motionless camera cannot be denied.  

But the problem for me is that others claim that the movie has a more general insight about women’s plight everywhere, and for me that’s where the film falls short, as if Akerman supposed that because she was depressed and alone that women everywhere must also be. Akerman is said to have based the film on the post-World War II generation of women that she observed in her younger life. If that’s truly the case, then I not only stand corrected, but I’m truly sorry, because Akerman must have been surrounded by a bunch of sad sacks. But I honestly don’t buy it.  Yes, many women over the decades have been completely justified in their dissatisfaction with living life as homemakers, but that doesn’t mean they lived like robots, absent of all feelings, sleepwalking through life.

The character Jeanne Dielman is a joyless, expressionless, friendless dud. A complete and utter pill. She shows no joy toward her son. No joy toward an acquaintance she runs into while running errands. No joy in music. No joy in receiving a letter from her sister in Canada (indeed, she reads it aloud with the same intonation one would use to read a cookbook recipe). No joy toward a neighbor’s baby, whom she watches for five minutes each day (this, to me, was the most revealing. How can you look at a baby and not smile and engage?). She admits to not having loved her husband who died six years ago, marrying him mainly to leave her parent’s home. And she apparently has made no friends over the years, which is odd. She is alone, lonely and depressed. Oh, and instead of getting a job where she could earn some money and be part of society, she chooses to prostitute herself (I have a hard time imagining how she found her clients, given how socially inept she appears to be. How exactly did the word get out? And how do men find satisfaction in what is — in essence — screwing a mannequin?).  

And this is meant to portray women’s experience everywhere? I don’t think so. The only things that ring universally true are the necessity to get married in order to leave home and to be in charge of housework by default. I get that. In the 1960s, my mother had aspirations of being a doctor, but coming from a modest family at a time when women “didn’t become doctors,” that dream was denied her. She married my father after a very brief courtship. At that time that was what women did. Either that, or they were stuck living in their parents’ homes, life suspended without the aid of a man. And I know she wasn’t entirely satisfied with being a mom and with running a household. But neither was she joyless. She still had some agency in her life, some control of her aspirations and how she viewed the world. She still played. She got together with friends. She dated after my parents split. She worked at a place of legitimate employment. Despite the similarities of their plights, my mother bears almost no resemblance to Jeanne Dielman.

In the film, the main character’s son says almost nothing throughout and offers not a finger of assistance to help his mother. In an episode of the wonderful podcast Filmspotting the hosts — both of whom love the movie— admonish the son and how unhelpful and ungrateful he is. What they fail to highlight is how uninterested Jeanne is in her son. In a revealing scene at the end of the film’s second day, Dielman’s son finally opens up to her, practically begging her to sit down and have an actual conversation. Instead, she’s impatient and dismissive, offering a quip and telling her son to go to sleep. You can chastise the son all you want, but if Dielman’s current disposition is any indication, her fatherless son has never actually been loved, merely tolerated. No wonder he shows no love for his mother and no propensity to help her with tasks.

The parent-child relationship in Jeanne Dielman reminds me of the parents in the film Revolutionary Road played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who view their kids at best as a nuisance and at worst as obstacles to their true ambitions. I liked that film quite a lot, but I reject the notion that somehow it represents American suburbia in the 1960s. Yes, it beautifully portrays the isolation and dissatisfaction associated with being a suburban mother lacking in agency. But the mother also failed to see the beauty right in front of her.

So no, I didn’t particularly like Jeanne Dielman, and like many highly-praised films, I fear that many people claim to love it mostly because they’ve been told to. For me, give me Rear Window or Goodfellas or Beginners or Eternal Sunshine or loads of other films any day of the week. I will not be watching Dielman again.