Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

directed by Chantal Akerman

Kyra Kaufer

How could you know? You’re not a woman.

There is not a moment when I am alone with myself that I do not think of Jeanne Dielman.

The first time I watched Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, I was alone in my dorm room and I watched it on my laptop. I’m not certain what on that particular day made me decide, “Hey, I’m going to order takeout on a Friday night and watch this three and a half hour long movie where nothing actually happens.” Some may say that it would be best to watch it in a theater if you are lucky enough to have it programmed near you, but I think this film works best when watched in solitude. No distractions or viewing partners. The film is not necessarily transformative, but rather forces you to face truths that you have always subconsciously known, and can be an overwhelming and emotional experience—especially after being locked in for a year. It is something that I believe everybody should watch once in their lives (or, like, five times in a year if you find a weird comfort in it like I do).

In Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, we are essentially watching a woman perform her daily routine over the course of three days, from the moment she wakes up in the morning until she goes to sleep that night, in what feels like real time. Jeanne shines her son’s shoes and prepares his breakfast, runs errands around town, looks after a neighbor’s baby, begins to cook dinner, welcomes a male visitor into her home, and scrubs her skin of the visit in the bathtub. Her son arrives home, she serves him dinner, and they prepare for the next day. By the second evening however, she starts to slip up. She begins to drop things, walks into rooms and forgets what she was about to do—an unsettling turning point after watching such a careful routine. On the third morning, she accidentally wakes up too early and has no idea what to do with herself. She sits in a living room chair in her pajamas, not to relax, but with unease. The audience feels this anxiety, knowing that this tension can only lead to a breaking point. The film is shot in only wide and mostly symmetrical shots, avoiding any close-ups or camera movement. The takes are long; they linger on an empty room after Jeanne leaves and turns the light off. More often than not, the film is nearly silent. The only sounds are tactile; the squishing of the ground beef as an egg is folded into a raw meatloaf, the scrubbing of the sponge against Jeanne’s bare skin. Loneliness is made visible on screen through the empty spaces.

In a 2009 interview with the Criterion Collection, Chantal Akerman said that she had cast Delphine Seyrig in the role because the housewife washing dishes is traditionally invisible in the home, not meant to be seen. Seyrig was “not the character at all. She was quite ‘the lady’.” This idea of putting Delphine Seyrig’s face to this role would make audiences pay more attention to the housewife and her meticulous rituals. The concept of visibility is particularly important with this film, as the crew was made up of a majority of women, even in more technical roles that were not traditionally performed by women, such as sound and lighting.

“But I tell you, if it were up to me…”

The rituals Jeanne performs are selfless. She works as a machine. Every task she completes is for somebody else, her son, her neighbor. She waits for her son to leave, cleans up his breakfast, and does not even think about eating her sandwich in silence until it is time to begin preparing for dinner. Even as she invites men into her home every evening, her compensation for her services goes straight back into an ever-present white bowl on the dining room table from which her son receives his pocket change. She has clearly performed this routine her entire life and will be performing it for the rest of her life. When Jeanne’s unseen neighbor picks up her infant from Jeanne’s home on the second afternoon, the neighbor is desperate for a conversation with anybody that will listen. She unloads onto a wordless Jeanne a story about waiting in line for the butcher shop that day. When it came her time to order, she panicked, although she’d done it a hundred times before, and ordered the same thing as the woman in front of her. She ended up paying too much money for meat that her family did not even like. In this moment, we realize that Jeanne is alone in her home, but she is not the only one living like this. All of the women seen in this film are in a role of service. Even when Jeanne has a quiet moment to herself in a cafe, she shares a knowing glance with the waitress.

Reflecting back on the past year in quarantine, the film has taken on a new meaning—the same day seems to repeat itself over and over again. The same limited interactions with the same people, only when “essential,” if anything at all. Routines and rituals can become comfortable after a while. There’s no telling what this lasting effect will have on us. How will we know what to do with ourselves when this cycle breaks? The woman venting to Jeanne in the butcher shop feels almost like wish fulfillment for the viewer.

The titular Jeanne Dielman is your mother, your aunt, your grandmother—she is you. Jeanne is every woman you have ever known that has cared for a man, sacrificing everything she had or could potentially have to fit into a mold of the domesticated woman. When asked by her son how she met his father, Jeanne reveals that she never actually wanted to be married, but rather it “seemed like the thing to do.” While Jeanne is now widowed and is no longer serving her husband, the routine that she had built up remains as a ghost. There is nobody forcing her to perform the routine, but it is imprinted on her. Historically, there has never been much of an outlet provided for the rage of women and women have been pinned as hysterical, hormonal, overreacting. You can only force something into submission for so long, until it bursts.

Kyra Kaufer is a screenwriter and director living on Long Island. She co-hosts the weekly podcast The Zillennial Canon and can be found on Twitter @garlicemoji.