Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

          While I’m a reasonably adventurous cinefile, the reputation and running time of Chantal Ackerman’s acclaimed character study Jeanne Dielman kept it near the bottom of my to-view list for decades—I was challenged to muster enthusiasm for a 3.5-hour picture comprising extraordinarily long takes of mundane activities. Even when Jeanne Dielman was named the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound in 2022 (more on that later), the movie seemed as if it would be a slog to watch. Now that I can finally report back from the other end of Jeanne Dielman’s 201 minutes, of course I understand that being a slog to watch is part of the picture’s design. It’s open to debate whether the film’s abnormal length was the best way achieve her goals, but clearly Ackerman wanted viewers to feel as numbed by repetition as the leading character does. Accordingly, the key question is whether the movie rewards viewers’ time. I believe the answer is yes, though perhaps not to the degree implied by Jeanne Dielman’s placement on the Sight and Sound list.
          For those unfamiliar with the picture, it depicts three days in the life of fortysomething widow Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), who lives with her young-adult son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), in a Brussels apartment. Jeanne supports the household with sex work, receiving one client per day as part of a highly regimented routine. Up each morning to prepare breakfast and send Syvlain off to school; cleaning, errands, and meal preparation interspersed with occasional childcare for a neighbor’s infant; then evenings spent serving dinner and helping Sylvain with schoolwork, even though he’s so absorbed in reading that he barely communicates with his mother. (The boy’s age and grade level is never stated, but he’s either a high-schooler or a college student.) Jeanne Dielman is as rigidly structured as the title character’s lifestyle, with chapter breaks identifying transitions between days, and the glacially paced plot only gets cooking about halfway through the movie, when an unexplained change in Jeanne’s mental state causes her to become dislodged from everyday activities, for instance dropping a spoon or forgetting to close one button on her housecoat. All of this is preamble to a single noteworthy event, which won’t be spoiled here but which retroactively imbues Jeanne Dielman with layers of meaning.

          It should be apparent by now that appraising Ackerman’s movie by conventional standards is pointless—even though the narrative has an ordinary shape, the style is borderline experimental. Ackerman deliberately avoids opportunities to take us into her leading character’s mind, forcing viewers to extract Jeanne’s psychology from her behavior. (The director reportedly coached leading lady Seyrig to constrain her facial expressions.) Viewers get enough information to grasp the contours of Jeanne’s life, but then Ackerman adds the element that makes Jeanne Dielman so challenging—outrageously long takes of activities ranging from the cleaning of dishes to the preparation of meals. Throughout Jeanne Dielman, a static camera watches Seyrig do uninteresting things in their full durations. Presumably the film’s advocates zero in on this aspect as one of the picture’s great strengths, a means of forcing viewers to engage with the grinding tedium of domestic work.

          And then there’s the climax, which provides a bracing commentary on the toll such domestic work, done in the service of men, has on women.
         I’m certain the film’s champions would argue that it must be watched repeatedly in order to appreciate its profundity. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though I acknowledge my willingness to watch comparatively dim-witted entertainment films over and over again compares poorly with my reluctance to spend another 201 minutes with Jeanne. Nonetheless, I feel confident that I took much of what the film has to offer from one viewing. Jeanne Dielman is, in its idiosyncratic and unwieldy fashion, both a crisp statement and a potent conversation piece. But could it possibly be the greatest film of all time, as the contributors to Sight and Sound’s list determined? No. It is difficult to perceive that designation as anything other than a rebuttal to decades of male-dominated cinema discourse. However, exalting Jeanne Dielman over enduring films directed by men could also be seen as an amplification of Jeanne Dielman’s message—in a patriarchal society, a woman has to make a hell of a noise to get heard.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: GROOVY

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

          One of Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s most acclaimed works and an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is not the easiest movie to penetrate—the story’s satire operates at such a sophisticated level that it’s easy to mistake some stretches of the narrative for straightforward psychodrama. Plus, as was Buñuel’s wont, the story loops around itself several times via tricky dream sequences and fake-outs that obscure what’s “really” happening. Yet for patient viewers willing to participate in Buñuel’s postmodern games, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie delivers a droll appraisal of the way feelings of entitlement blind the semi-rich to the absurdity of their own circumstances.

          The principal running gag of the movie involves a group of upper-middle-class friends attempting to get together for a dinner date. Throughout the story, outrageous events scuttle the plans—a restaurant holds a wake, complete with a corpse, during the dinner hour; a group of soldiers appears at a country house expecting entertainment and food; gun-toting gangsters invade a dinner party; and so on. The joke, of course, is that the protagonists are so preoccupied with creature comforts that they never lose their appetites—it’s as if the working-class people who interrupt the protagonists simply don’t exist. Meanwhile, Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière reveal the sordid activities of the main characters. A foreign ambassador (Fernando Rey) moonlights as a cocaine smuggler; a horny couple (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stéphane Audran) sneaks away from guests to screw in the woods; an underserviced housewife (Delphine Seyrig) has an affair with a family friend; et cetera.

          Even though The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie runs a brisk 102 minutes, Buñuel and Carrière cram a lot of narrative content into the movie—beyond the items already mentioned, there’s also a subplot about a sexy would-be terrorist and two strange sequences of people describing their dreams, which are depicted via surrealistic vignettes.

          Whether all of this material coalesces into a unified statement is a subjective matter, because the ambiguous final images could imply a heavy-handed theme of awful people stuck on a road to nowhere—or the images could imply something else. (Providing concrete answers was never Buñuel’s thing.) Appraising The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie by standard criteria is pointless, seeing as how the film does not aspire to realism, but it’s sufficient to say that Buñuel stocks the film with attractive women, debonair men, and elegant locations—these slick surfaces amplify the director’s ideas about a class preoccupied with materialism. One more thing: Because other viewers may have the same experience, I should add that that the discreet charm of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie escaped me on first viewing, but the more I thought about the movie, the more its aesthetic scheme—and its virtues—came into focus.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: GROOVY

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

          One of the artiest exploitation movies of the ’70s, the Belgian vampire thriller Daughters of Darkness features such extraordinarily beautiful cinematography—and, to be frank, such extraordinarily beautiful women—that it’s tempting to seek some deeper significance, as if the movie is more than just a tastefully executed shocker. Alas, director/co-writer Harry Kümel’s cult-favorite movie doesn’t reward close scrutiny, and in fact the picture’s biggest flaw is a ponderousness suggesting Kümel himself thought he was making a Grand Statement. Shot with English-language dialogue despite its European origins, the picture originally ran a plodding 100 minutes, though a widely available expurgated cut is only 87 minutes long. Which version suits which viewer is a matter of taste, because those who get hooked on the picture may want to savor every possible frame.

          When the story begins, an attractive newlywed couple arrives at a seaside resort, which is empty because the year’s tourist season has ended, and they learn that several murders has taken place nearby. Worse, the victims were drained of blood. Then, when a beautiful countess arrives at the hotel with her female companion/servant at her side, the couple falls under the countess’ charismatic spell. It turns out the countess is a centuries-old vampire with nefarious designs on the couple. So begins a strange odyssey filled with betrayal, death, and sex. There’s nothing new about the eroticized-horror formula, so what makes Daughters of Darkness unique is its intoxicating style. Kümel treats every shot like a photographic art project, filling the screen with arresting compositions and subtle textures; thus, when he strings his beguiling images together with meditative editing and mournful music, he creates a bewitching atmosphere.

          Contributing to this effect are actresses Delphine Seyrig, as the countess, and Andrea Rau, as her servant. Seyrig is a stunning blonde with aristocratic bearing who, at first, seems as if she’ll be an ice queen—so when she reveals fragility, insecurity, and need, a quietly textured performance emerges. Rau is a sensuous brunette, the natural visual counterpart to Seyrig, and though her presence is less nuanced that Seyrig’s, Rau affects a plaintive quality. (As the newlyweds, John Karlen is enjoyably sleazy and Danielle Ouimet, the cast’s weak link, is merely lovely.) In the movie’s grandest contrivance, the countess is revealed to be Elizabeth Báthory, the infamous 16th-century Hungarian aristocrat who bathed in the blood of virgins because she felt doing so would preserve her beauty; like Kümel’s rarified pictorial style, this allusion to history gives Daughters of Darkness a sophisticated sheen lesser films of its ilk lack, but not actual depth.

Daughters of Darkness: GROOVY

The Black Windmill (1974)

          The Black Windmill is a straightforward thriller distinguished by the onscreen participation of Michael Caine and the behind-the-camera participation of director Don Siegel. Caine grounds the picture in his understated performance brimming with just-below-the-surface intensity, and Siegel makes sure the movie stays laser-focused on the task of generating tension. So, even though the plot is quite ordinary and the ending is a bit on the abrupt side, it’s hard to argue with results, and The Black Windmill is consistently compelling, exciting, and nerve-jangling. It may not be what the poster promises (“The ultimate experience in controlled terror”), but it’s a solid potboiler.

          Caine plays Major John Tarrant, a British covert operative under the supervision of unctuous spymaster Cedric Harper (Donald Pleasence). Violent crooks led by a mysterious Irishman (John Vernon) kidnap Tarrant’s son, then use their hostage for leverage to pressure Harper into handing over a cache of diamonds his agency is holding. (Rest assured this seems a lot less convoluted when it unfolds onscreen.) The story twists in interesting ways as Tarrant realizes his superiors value their financial assets more highly than the life of his son, so Tarrant steals the diamonds and attempts to outsmart the crooks. While still leaving room for a touch of nuance here and there, the picture builds steadily from one nasty situation to the next while Tarrant drifts further into illegality.

          As always, Caine excels at illustrating on-the-fly calculations; watching him assess situations and change strategy is pure pleasure, because subtle fluctuations dart across his expressive features like lightning sparking in the night sky. Pleasence is terrific as well, playing a heartless survivor whose mousy demeanor hides lethal ambition, and Vernon delivers another of his enjoyably florid turns as a cold-blooded monster. Joss Acklaland, Clive Revill, and chilly European starlet Delphine Seyrig also appear, and Nicholas and Alexandra Oscar nominee Janet Suzman gives an emotional performance as Tarrant’s estranged wife, who finds herself drawn back to Tarrant because of their family’s harrowing circumstances. Thanks to all of these virtues, it doesn’t matter that The Black Windmill isn’t really about anything, because the movie does exactly what it’s supposed to do and nothing more.

The Black Windmill: GROOVY