Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Directed by Chantal Akerman. Starring Delphine Seyrig.

This film is unavailable in video or DVD in the United States, so you're going to have to either find a bootleg of this on eBay and see for yourself or simply take my word for it- this is one hell of a movie. The storyline is unassuming enough- the title character, a single mother (Seyrig) who goes about her daily routine, raising her son, doing errands, and prostituting herself once a day for spending money. What really distinguishes the film is Akerman's attention to detail in the woman's life, with extensive use of real time. As we see her performing her usual business, we become caught up in the rhythms of her life and surrender over to the film's pacing, Akerman's mastery of which is nothing short of masterful. I saw this twice, projecting it one reel at a time on 16mm film, and both times I saw it a strange thing happened- as each reel progressed, I became so wrapped up in the seemingly mundane events of the film that time seemed to bend and before I knew it the reel would be over. It's this patience on the part of the filmmaker to take the time to establish the patterns of Jeanne's life that makes the later scenes that much more effective, as we see her begin to deviate in small ways from the routine (forgetting to replace the lid on a soup tureen, sitting in a different booth in a restaurant), and these small moments have a startling amount of impact because how different from the norm they feel to Jeanne and, by virtue of Akerman's direction, to us. After I saw the film for the first time I had characterized Jeanne as a control freak, who keeps to her routine and who after deviating from it repeatedly starts to lose her grip on reality, leading up to the film's shocking climax. However, shortly after seeing the film for the second time, I read that the director had dedicated the film to her mother, and I realized that Akerman meant Jeanne to represent housewives in general, whose unheralded lives can be so stiflingly regimented that there can be little room for error. This realization casts the film into sharp relief, making the film not only one of the greatest I've ever seen but arguably one of the most important as well, a rare and altogether quite special document of real life.