Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Directed by Chantal Akerman
There are movies that seduce, movies that assault, and movies that hold you in a kind of trance. Then there’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which plays like a dare—an endurance test disguised as feminist art. It’s not so much a film as a monolithic experiment in repetition, the cinematic equivalent of being locked in a small, airless room while someone folds laundry in slow motion. That’s not necessarily a criticism—some people like being hypnotized, some people need the narcotic of a strict formal structure—but it is an observation. Chantal Akerman didn’t make a movie so much as she erected a piece of conceptual architecture, a three-hour-and-twenty-one-minute mausoleum for time itself.
A woman, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), cooks, cleans, and services her afternoon clients with the grim precision of a metronome. The camera barely moves. The edits are few. We watch, in real time, as she peels potatoes, washes dishes, and folds bedsheets. The audience becomes complicit in her routine: we measure out her days by the clink of a spoon against a teacup, the metallic scrape of a knife over a cutting board. And as her perfectly calibrated schedule starts to slip—she overcooks the potatoes, she forgets to turn off a light—we feel the faintest seismic shifts in her mental state. This is cinema as erosion. Akerman makes us wait, and wait, and wait, for the inevitable crack.
It’s a bold concept. The film operates on a kind of oppressive minimalism, reducing domestic life to a sequence of robotic gestures. Jeanne is trapped in a purgatory of gendered labor, her existence a series of transactions—sex, cooking, cleaning—all performed with the same eerie blankness. If it sounds like a theoretical exercise, that’s because it is. Akerman’s method is almost perversely rigid: she forces us to live inside Jeanne’s schedule, to feel the weight of time pressing down on her. The film’s power comes not from traditional dramatic tension but from the sheer relentlessness of its structure.
But here’s the problem: watching Jeanne Dielman is an experience that flirts with tedium and then commits to it entirely. There’s a fine line between artistic patience and aesthetic torture, and Akerman gleefully dances across it. The film’s conceit is simple: repetition breeds suffocation. We’re meant to feel the claustrophobia of Jeanne’s existence, to understand, on a visceral level, the way time grinds her down. But there’s a crucial difference between making an audience feel trapped and making an audience bored, and Jeanne Dielman often confuses the two. Akerman’s camera doesn’t observe so much as it lingers—stubbornly, mercilessly—forcing us to witness the banal with a level of scrutiny usually reserved for crime scenes. The idea, I suppose, is that we come to recognize the horror lurking in the mundane. But what if the mundane just stays mundane?
Delphine Seyrig, a performer of luminous intelligence, is trapped inside Akerman’s grand design. Jeanne’s emotions—her growing anxiety, her microscopic unraveling—must be conveyed in infinitesimal shifts, in the smallest changes of breath or movement. Seyrig delivers a performance of rigorous control, her face a smooth, unreadable mask. And yet, the film demands so much patience that by the time Jeanne’s carefully arranged life collapses into violence, the moment lands with an almost perfunctory thud.
Perhaps that’s the point. Jeanne Dielman isn’t about catharsis. It’s about exhaustion. It’s about the relentless ticking of days, the crushing monotony of domestic servitude. And Akerman, with the self-serious determination of a sculptor chiseling away at a block of ice, commits fully to the bit. But this kind of filmmaking—so wedded to its own rigorous minimalism, so uninterested in meeting the audience even halfway—runs the risk of fetishizing its own endurance test.
The film’s reputation has only grown with time, and with its ascension to the top of the Sight & Sound poll as the greatest film of all time, Jeanne Dielman has transformed from a cult object into something like a sacred text. There is a kind of intellectual masochism at play in its most fervent defenders—a belief that difficulty, length, and rigor automatically equate to greatness. But while Jeanne Dielman is a masterpiece of its own hermetic logic, it’s also a film that actively repels engagement. It doesn’t seek to move you so much as to wear you down.
That’s not to say that it’s unimportant. Akerman’s achievement is undeniable: she takes a woman’s life—a life of endless repetition, of invisibility—and forces us to look at it until our eyes ache. In doing so, she reverses the traditional cinematic gaze; here, a woman’s domestic routine is given the same weight as an epic tragedy. But the film’s relentless structure, its punishing rhythm, leaves little space for spontaneity or discovery. It is a film that demands you submit to its logic entirely, and if you do, perhaps you will emerge transformed. But if you resist—if you refuse to equate duration with depth—you may find yourself wondering whether an experiment in endurance is quite the same thing as an emotional experience.
Maybe that’s why so many people can’t decide if they love it or loathe it. The film doesn’t allow for middle ground. It is an aesthetic stance as much as a narrative one. It dares you to lose yourself in its rhythms or else to fight against them. It is, in some ways, critic-proof: if you complain that it’s dull, well, that’s because you’re supposed to feel the dullness. If you find it hypnotic, you’re engaging with its formal genius. If you’re simply irritated, you’ve failed the test.
Akerman’s insistence on her methods, her refusal to yield to anything resembling traditional cinematic pleasure, is both the film’s greatest strength and its biggest limitation. It is an artifact of absolute control, a work of cinematic austerity that asks you to surrender to its time scale, to recalibrate your very sense of what a movie can be. And in that sense, it’s a triumph. But is it a great film? That depends on what you want cinema to do. If you believe a film should challenge you, stretch your attention span, and force you into a new kind of seeing, then yes. If you believe that film should contain something like human warmth, like pleasure, like life in all its messiness, then Jeanne Dielman is a tomb.
One can admire Akerman’s rigor, respect her vision, and still feel that the result is closer to an experiment in duration than to a film that breathes. There is artistry here, certainly. There is purpose. But watching Jeanne Dielman is less like watching a movie and more like participating in a very slow, very elegant endurance test. And endurance, while an admirable quality in athletes and ascetics, is not always the same thing as art.
