CINEMASOPHY: A Dialogue of Eras — March Films
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Cinema, an inseparable part of our lives, entertains while persistently raising sharp and uncomfortable questions. A lot can be said about a person based on the films they watch and love. Over the past half-century, at least thousands of lists of great movies have emerged — films every curious individual should watch to discover something about themselves.
For the next 12 months, this column will feature «alternative» cinema — perhaps not the loudest, but certainly extraordinary and profound. Films that deserve to be watched. Watched and loved. These are 24 stories of love, hate, actions, violence, and death. Stories about everything that cinema truly embodies.
«JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES» (FRANCE, BELGIUM, 1975)
Director: Chantal Akerman
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jean Decorte, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
It simultaneously resembles a philosophical parable and a trendy online show (like «Dom-2»), a drama that induces aesthetic stupor, telling the story of a respectable Belgian woman who is forced to engage in prostitution.
The mid-1970s was the era of the rise of feminist cinema. Around this time, films that raised questions about the role and place of women in a world usurped by men were released almost simultaneously: from John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence about a mother struggling with mental disorders, to Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, about a poor widow with a young son, traveling across the country in hopes of starting a new life, to Jack Hill’s Coffy, where a young nurse Pam Grier embarks on a warpath against the drug dealers who got her sister hooked; from the plot-similar Foxy Brown to Spielberg’s Jaws, a film that, in its structure, embedded a message about a world of men under the burden of feminism (just like the shark in Jaws, which rises up against everyone because it is both in the shadows and in the spotlight, everywhere and nowhere).
If Jaws is considered a «Moby Dick» of pop culture, a film that gave the term «blockbuster» its genre-defining dimension, then Jeanne Dielman… is the more intellectually complex Stepford Wives (also released in 1975), aimed at a highbrow audience prone to reflection. The Stepford Wives, a horror genre film (its 2005 remake is more of a comedic statement), illustrates the male desire for compliant, sexual wives who do what they’re told and never complain. Jeanne… is shot in a quasi-realistic style, telling the story of a woman turning into a flawless domestic machine.
Moreover, the debut of young Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, like that of her American counterparts, somewhat depends on the plot’s mystery. If you’re unfamiliar with the film, stay away from spoilers, as the resolution is part of the reward for those who endure almost three and a half hours of one of the most significant European films of the second half of the 20th century.
What you’re watching is a chronicle of three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), a widow and housewife who raises her teenage son alone, earning a living through prostitution. She spends her days with household chores, serving clients while potatoes cook on the stove.
The 25-year-old director vividly shows her protagonist’s life, not just limited to the boredom of Jeanne’s hopeless existence. Akerman openly showcases the monotony and banality of routine life, with its suffocating emptiness, which ultimately leads Jeanne to a tragic end. Jeanne Dielman… is a film about the power of domestic rituals and a person reduced to their mundane functions.
Delphine Seyrig, chosen for the leading role (unlike her other performances), deliberately plays flatly, gradually revealing the psychological portrait of her character, with subtle details of her behavior that would likely have been unnoticed in a shorter film with more conventional dramatic accents.
By the time the film hits the three-hour mark, the almost imperceptible tension in Jeanne’s face and the abruptness of her gestures — while preparing coffee and potatoes — suggest the peak of this epic melodrama.
Unlike most auteur films that delve into spiritual realms, Jeanne Dielman… is a spotlight aimed at the material world. This is its remarkable secret that captivated a demanding audience back then. Akerman does not hide the meaning within but keeps it on the surface. She knows that trying to penetrate beyond the form leads only to a meeting with our own imagination; engaging with the form leaves us face-to-face with objective truth.
The filming method, at a ninety-degree angle, creates a square space in the frame, evoking a sense of claustrophobia. The immense runtime seems to invite us to settle at the designated address in the title and live there for three days, almost in real-time, observing and listening to the formal, ritualized conversations between mother and son. This is the true meaning of this experimental film.
The dialogues between mother and son are shown deliberately detached, through routine phrases, gestures, and movements. The mother cleans, washes, cooks… If the son is just a machine, the mother here is the machine of machines. The characters on screen are reduced to dehumanized objects. Who made them like this? Capitalism, the prevailing socio-economic system, or (more complexly) self-exploitation and self-alienation?
The central theme of Jeanne Dielman… is the theme of empty time, the wasted life, and the flight from freedom, which connects all the characters in this story, including the clients who come. And the empty everyday life — worlds made up of formal communicative constructs.
Filmed half a century ago, this film, which encourages self-reflection and serves as a pathological anatomy of daily routine, with its empty conversations and domestic rituals, perfectly mirrors today’s emptiness in our existence.
«TONI ERDMANN» (GERMANY, AUSTRIA, FRANCE, ROMANIA, 2016)
Director: Maren Ade
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek
If Jeanne Dielman… tells the story of how self-exploitation and alienation from one’s own «self» turn people into machines, then another European masterpiece, the tragicomedy Toni Erdmann, tells the story of an actual resurrection: an aging music teacher here tries to save his successful, childless, and lonely careerist daughter (who has already turned into a machine) from total, complete dehumanization.
These two films have much in common: both were directed by prominent women in European cinema, and both feature the names of the main characters in the titles; additionally, both films explore the decline of Mother Europe through personal stories.
German director Maren Ade (All Other) in her third film, which has garnered every possible European award (Cannes Film Festival prize, several key statuettes from the European Film Academy, and an Oscar nomination) and unprecedented international recognition, makes the aging, divorced retiree Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a retired music teacher who lives with his equally old dog and amuses himself and others with various eccentric jokes, the main character.
For this, he always has a ridiculous dental prosthesis ready, which he wears when he needs to make someone laugh or scare them. Winfried has an aging mother, whom he also cares for, and an adult daughter, Ines (brilliantly played by Sandra Hüller), who works for a large consulting company in Romania. She maintains a formal relationship with her father and spends most of her rare visits talking on the phone.
In an attempt to improve his nonexistent relationship with his daughter, Winfried decides to pretend to be someone else. He dons his «funny» teeth, a shaggy black wig, and under the false name Toni Erdmann, flies to Bucharest to meet Ines, who is wasting her life in corporate routine.
At first, Ines is embarrassed by her father’s silly jokes, which put her in awkward situations in front of corporate bigwigs. But as the film progresses, the number of awkward situations caused by her father and silent scenes begins to reach a critical level, and the comedy turns into something overtly tragic (father and daughter love each other, but they hurt each other in the process). The climax comes with Ines’ «nude» birthday, where the birthday girl, losing her mind, demands that her guests strip, and they, shyly covering their genitals with gifts, obediently agree.
The tough, almost cruel daughter, whose job involves firing a large number of Romanian oil workers with the least damage to the company, begins to acquire characteristics of not a machine, but a living person — sometimes absurd, sometimes tearful, but alive.
While telling the story of the complex relationship between father and daughter, Maren Ade also hints that it is not just Ines who loses (but thanks to her father, regains) her human form, but Europe as a whole.
The film addresses her dehumanization, shown, among other things, through the harsh manners of capitalist corporate culture with its economic dominance (Ines treats her assistant roughly, and the corporate management does the same to her). This cozy and touchingly funny film, which is already being remade in Hollywood with Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig in the leading roles, touches on issues of human dehumanization in a capitalist society.
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