Upon its release in 1975, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. The film's reputation has not wavered: it tied with Hitchcock's Psycho as the 35th greatest film of all time in the most recent Sight & Sound poll.
It may be the only occasion when those two films appear together. Jeanne Dielman has made a sizable contribution to avant-garde cinema and feminist theory, but it makes for challenging viewing. We watch, for almost three-and-a-half hours, as Jeanne cooks, peels potatoes, takes a bath, eats dinner with her adolescent son, shops for groceries, searches for a missing button and engages in prostitution.
The pacing and dead time of No Home Movie will come as little surprise to fans of Akerman’s installation-friendly oeuvre. Rooms, glimpsed through doors, sit idle and unmolested. Her beloved mother, an elderly Auschwitz survivor, dozes in her chair or is prodded awake by her daughter’s questions. Was the man who helped Chantal’s mother escape from Poland to Belgium in love with her? “We thought we were safe in Belgium,” explains Natalia. But what happened was “insidious”.
Akerman’s grandparents died in Auschwitz and the Holocaust continues to cast a shadow on their small family unit. Conversations turn, either directly or indirectly, towards Judaism, Poland or the second World War.
Long shots of barren landscapes and domestic nothingness are punctured, in true Akerman style, with momentary eruptions of pain (“Daddy said ‘If you’re top of your class, your school must be useless’), poignancy (“You were the most beautiful mother; I was always proud when you picked me up from kindergarten”) and, most of all, love.
The maternal bond between Natalia and Chantal Akerman is as fierce and as tender as can be. They hover over one another, they blow kisses, and they declare love: “When I see you like that I want to squeeze you in my arms,” says maman.
Chantal appears mostly by proxy – from behind, or in the corner of a Skype screen, or as a reflection in murky water – until a late sequence when we watch he tie her shoelaces, pull the curtains and leave her small bedroom. Akerman took her own life last October, just after she had completed this portrait of her mother (who died in 2013) and it's now impossible to watch that scene without reading it as a kind of suicide note.
The film, too, can feel almost unbearable. Its absences and deadness is precisely the point. No Home Movie may be intimate and domestic but it's not a home movie because there is no more home.
