Still from "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles"
Directed by Chantal Akerman, 1975. Starring Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman.
Methodical like a professional criminal, Jeanne Dielman peels the potatoes. In this scene from the 3 hour film, Dielman is frustrated. Having overcooked the potatoes she has run to the store for another bag. Someone else may have used the overcooked potatoes for mash or abandoned the side dish altogether, but Dielman is satisfying her expectations of serving schnitzel with boiled potatoes for dinner. Every moment in Dielman’s life is structured like that. Every morning she shines her son's shoes, for lunch she eats an aluminum wrapped sandwich prepared earlier in the day, in the afternoon she puts potatoes on to boil before she takes her daily client into the bedroom. Housework is often regarded as the chores that take time away from more meaningful activities in our lives. So we hurry through it while using every new product to expedite housework: pre-greased pans, pre-cut food, disposable towels. But Dielman executes each chore with focus and care, as if the meaning of our lives is exactly to make all of our gestures meaningful. Spoiler alert: the movie ends violently. Twice in the film, the son speaks to his mother about sex, characterizing sex as violence to a woman. But the reason Dielman stabs her client at the end of the film has less to do with psychic retribution, than with his interference in her schedule: after they are done, she gets dressed while he wallows smugly on the bed. John Waters' 1994 dark comedy "Serial Mom" comes to mind. In this movie, Beverly Sutphin (played by Kathleen Turner) is the picture of suburban normalcy, but what no one suspects is that her passion for maintaining social convention, as in, for example, recycling, is strong enough to kill for. Like Jeanne Dielman, she is rigid in maintaining her world's order and interference with her expectations eventually leads to her lashing out, rather than, say, an internal breakdown. Violence is not their escape from the mental imprisonment of a life of repetition, but the spurts of a revolution to maintain life as usual.
Text by Xenia Pachikov