My mother, your mother, his mother is waiting. The water is boiling, laundry is in the dryer, supper is ready in about five minutes, and she waits for me, you, and him. Discreetly, she knits mankind a wool sweater to keep armoured from the unkind but asks for no thanks in return. She is a woman of kind, quiet, devalued, ignored, abused, monotonous labour, and in Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, her name is Jeanne Dielman.
Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) is a widowed housewife, surviving in a world of quiet static and footsteps. Her existence is contained in a rigid pattern of domestic chores while caring for her adolescent son and their bourgeois one-bedroom apartment. In between grocery shopping and dinner preparation, Jeanne earns their little finances through afternoon sex work with unidentified men. She stuffs the francs into a decorative tureen atop the dining table, safely stored for daily domestic necessities: meat, vegetables, shoe maintenance, stamps. In real time, Jeanne performs her repeated duties as choreographed dances between the living room and kitchen, each one of her steps in perfect rhythm with the last. But with each passing day, the patience carried through her mechanical ritual begins to unravel along with her sanity.
Jeanne Dielman is a slow film. Its three hours and twenty minutes are tedious and achingly dull. With that, the dishes, both warm and dirty, demand to be reckoned with. What it reveals are the generations of alienated women clawing at the walls of their captivity in a patriarchal empire. Her stillness cloaks a tireless plea for actualization in a system that desires servitude. Jeanne’s pain is universal. This is the lonesome life of a housewife and it is her who makes the world go round.
The mesmerizing practice of restrained hysteria is without music or many words in Jeanne Dielman. The silent madness of womanhood is plastered on the long takes of stasis and solitude directed by Akerman, who was 25 years old at the time of filming. Her camera is still but it captures each burst of new boredom. Lengthy scenes lull the audience into the hypnosis of her housewifery and startle its viewers with tiny errors of accidental over-cooked potatoes, missed buttons, and unbrushed hair—symptoms of an unglued homemaker that are subtle but clear.
The final scene of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelle is spent quietly. For seven minutes, her face scantily reads emotion. She sits silently amongst the darkness at the kitchen table staring into the space in front of her. The weight of the world is palpably removed from her shoulders. This is her end. At last, she is free.