Chantal Akerman's three-hour study of three days in the life of a Belgian housewife - or is she a wife? There is no sign of a Mr Dielman, though Jeanne Dielman has a son, the vaguely moronic grown up boy whose sofa-bed she makes and puts away each morning. That is one of the rituals, customs, habits that she must repeat every day. Cleaning, cooking, bathing herself, shopping, taking lunch in a cafe, banking her income, and of course earning her income, which she does by entertaining gentlemen in the afternoons.
That we could then call her 'a prostitute' is perhaps made more complicated by the aesthetic decision taken by the film-maker to give equal weighting to the other activities in her day. By contrast, in other filmed portraits of 'women on the game' (Vivre Sa Vie, Belle De Jour, Working Girls) the women's other routines are glossed over and the performance of their duties is given most film-time, making the description of them as 'working girls', and nothing else, seem appropriate. Catherine Deneuve is a housewife who, bored of her eventless life, goes on the game; she then becomes a prostitute. Jeanne Dielman may not even be a housewife; she is a mother who cleans house, prepares food, washes herself, goes shopping, and earns income by welcoming men into her bedroom during one hour of the afternoon. What does this make her? It makes her 'Jeanne Dielman, 23Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'. Quite simply, she is her address.
We see three of her clients, a white-haired old man, a youth, and a middle-aged Belgiques with a handlebar moustache. He is the unluckiest of the three, but we don't find that out until the 183rd minute of this careful, methodical study. this sequence of 'perpendicular' shots. Like the Dardennes brothers whose documentaries maintain an almost painfully steady eye on their subjects, Chantal Akerman likes to look from a certain distance, for long periods of time with an almost childlike unblinkingness. That quality may not be peculiarly Belgian, but for a small country an awful lot of people seem to get killed here, if all of the victims of the Poirot and Maigret novels are included. In this tiny notoriously neutral nation trapped between larger neighbours it has been their history to sit back and watch.
Chantal Akerman creates feminist films whose political concept matches their aesthetic form. On the same disk set, her films Rendez-vous of Anna, Je Tu Il Elle, Hotel Monterey, News From Home, and a documentary on Chantal Akerman, together with interviews with those who know her. and two early short films.