Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
A singular work in film history, Jeanne Dielman… meticulously details – with a sense of impending doom – the daily routine of a middle-aged widow.
Jeanne, who lives with her teenage son, fills her empty life with an endless checklist of chores. She cooks, cleans, shops, and every afternoon, in the window of time it takes for the dinner potatoes to boil, she has sex for money with a gentleman caller. Three days in the repetitive existence of this 40-ish middle-class widow are revealed through static, head-on compositions and unblinking blocks of real time.
In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, JEANNE DIELMAN is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analysed and argued over for decades. (source: www.criterion.com)