Jeanne Dielman
Or, because the full title would be too big up there, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The BFI, by way of Sight and Sound magazine, does a poll every ten years of the best movies ever made, and in 2022 it voted this as the best movie ever made. I would consider myself a person who has seen a reasonable amount of movies, and have certainly heard of even more, but my reaction here was Jeanne Who? I had somehow missed ever hearing a mention of the best film in existence and I had seen Jaws: The Revenge at least twice.
Skipping to the end, is this the best film ever made? I mean, no, but it’s very good.
Jeanne Dielman is a widow who lives at the address above (I presume, now that I think of it, it’s not actually specified), and goes about a very specific, controlled routine every day. This movie is 195 minutes long, and the first third of it is this routine: preparing food, letting it cook, doing some sex work, her teenage son comes home from school, she tells him not to read at the table but they eat in total silence, they listen to the radio, he folds out the couch, he brings up some horrifyingly intimate topic like how sex was with his father, and then everyone goes asleep.
On the second day, things start to fall apart a little bit. I watched an interview with director Chantal Akerman who said that, on this second day, Jeanne had her first ever orgasm during the sex work portion of the day, and it threw her life completely out. I thoroughly did not realise this on watching, but I’m not sure you’re supposed to. Until the last one, that part of the day is going into a room with some dude, closing the door, and then getting paid. We don’t see anything. I guess you’re supposed to intuit it from the end (I did not).
Anyway, much as Daisies could not be any longer, the next entry in my Euro-movies-by-women-about-women miniseries could not be any shorter. By having the first day of routine shown in all its minutiae, we start to notice the cracks in the routine on the second day as her life spills out of control a tiny bit at a time. She boils the potatoes too long. She forgets to do up a button. The milk has gone off, she fails to make coffee, tries to brew it again, screws up the whole thing. In light of the first hour, it’s more shocking and engrossing than any number of more exploitative offerings.
Below I will write spoilers for the end. I am only writing this sentence because below I will also complain about people writing spoilers for the end.
The next day she goes to the bank but it’s closed. She tries to find a replacement button but nobody has the precise one. Her next client gives her another orgasm and she stabs him in the neck with a scissors. Now, I’m glad I didn’t read about this in advance when the Sight and Sound list came out in 2022, because so many articles are like, paragraph one: Jeanne Dielman is about a widow who does some sex work and kills a client. That’s the end, dickheads. That’s the single bit of action after three hours of meticulous build up. After that she sits at the living room table for about five full minutes of screen time and then it’s over. Let us have the experience.