Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Staggering. As anticipated, one of those films that’s difficult to recover from. The kind that won’t let your heart stop racing, won’t let your mind turn to any other subject, won’t let you go on about a normal day — particularly so in this case because to go on about a normal day, to do the dishes or the laundry, would be now too psychotically tied up in Jeanne Dielman’s own rigorously performed daily tasks; I might begin to wonder if I too am losing my stable shell of self while fetching the mail, might act out in a frightfully perverse show of agency while preparing my lunch.

This is the masterpiece many say it is, of filmic technique and feminist critique, and any who suspect they might be bored by watching a half-silent film about a woman mostly doing housework should just skip it, and not taint my new love. The film demands a lot and from a captive viewer; you must decide within ten minutes whether this is a woman you could care about, invest yourself in, even if you are given little of the usual expositional reasons to. When Jeanne flits from one chore to the next, switches off a light or closes a door, stares into space or silently at her son, it will not do to merely watch her; then, yes, for three hours you may be bored. You must inhabit her space, see with her eyes, think what thoughts must lurk behind that perfectly impassive gaze… It is, actually, riveting.

Jeanne is not living, not at any level beyond basic routine, and she falters when the smallest detail of her perpetually lived day is found amiss; these rituals are clearly an expression of love for her son, and his newly voiced horror at the realization that his mother has ever been ‘violently penetrated’ is an expression of love for her, but they cannot connect; never once, I don’t think, do two characters make eye contact in this film; once in a while they look at one another, but they never do connect. In the final minutes the viewer is let in on what happens when Jeanne leads her afternoon company into her bedroom, and what that act has perhaps always done to her usual emotional stasis, but this time — perhaps at random, perhaps in a culmination of years like this — she acts.

Akerman’s uncompromisingly rigid structure and social commentary lay the necessary foundation. Seyrig, in a heartrending performance felt in every extremity of her body, makes it work.