Monday, 17 February 2025

Coming out of her shell: "Memoir of a Snail"


If only as an indicator of the Academy's collective mental health at the start of 2025, consider this year's Best Animated Feature category. Three of the five nominated titles are digimations, one broadly optimistic about humanity's ability to survive crisis and change (the Disney-released 
Inside Out 2, inevitably), two flatly despairing (The Wild Robot, Flow). The other two contenders showcase stopmotion, though even here a choice presents. On the cheery front, there is, of course, Aardman's Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. And then there's Memoir of a Snail, which follows in the depressively droll (or drolly depressive) lineage of Australian writer-director Adam Elliot's previous Harvie Krumpet, an Oscar winner for Best Animated Short in 2004, and Mary and Max. Where Nick Park folds his plasticine into the shape of eccentric Northern boffins who may or may not resemble a roundabout self-portrait, Elliot has an enduring fondness for marginalised figures poked, prodded and occasionally flattened by life, which makes claymation the ideal medium for him to be working in: it allows us to more tangibly feel, sometimes even see, the fickle fingers of fate digging into his characters, and the cracks of despair, sorrow and grief opening up in their wake. Elliot's new movie, which not untypically commences with a withered crone's dying breath, forms an extended study of one Grace Pudel (pronounced Puddle, possibly after Hyacinth Bucket), a snail-obsessed misfit with a hairlip whose mother died during childhood and whose father passed soon after. We find Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook) in her late friend's vegetable garden, narrating the story of her rough childhood licking batteries and suchlike with delinquent twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a creation who resembles Bart Simpson redrawn by The Cure's Robert Smith. Grace's onscreen audience is her favourite snail Sylvia, named after Ms. Plath. All that should give you some idea of the issues in play here, and also the prevailing outlook. I'm not saying that Elliot has a gloomy disposition, but when Gilbert declares early on (of the snail-shaped ring gifted to him by his sis) "I'm going to wear this until the day I die", you do worry how much longer the tyke can be for this world.

The salvation of Elliot's films has always been that they're so comfortable, even relaxed around our damnation that they become mordantly funny. I'd lay good money that one formative influence on this career was Tim Burton, though Elliot strides even further into the mire than Burton has publicly. One of young Gracie's pals is a homeless man sacked from his previous position of magistrate after admitting to compulsively masturbating during trials. Grace's father, a sometime street performer in Paris, is reduced to working the rough-edged Melbourne suburb of Brunswick; one gig there is preceded by a very Australian heckle of "wanker!", and dad is subsequently run over by a truck. If you don't subscribe to the "life's hard, and then you die" worldview, this could well seem gruelling, a series of episodic variations on the same grim theme. (Such is life, the pessimists say.) There are points in the second half where you sense the misery clotting, resulting in a film that feels some way longer and denser than its stated 94 minutes. The consolation, which is considerable, is that Elliot's modelling has become only more ambitious, which in turn allows fresh air and sunshine to penetrate the overall cloud cover. The animator's earlier projects unfurled around cramped sets, tactically underlit to conceal any budgetary constraints, but here he really is extending himself, building worlds: funfairs, Paris, The Two Ronnies on the telly, various unsuitable foster homes (not least a swingers' hub and a cult complex), a self-assembled crazy golf course, and a setpiece with John Denver and a helicopter ("Take me home, country roads!") which does much in itself to explain the kid-unfriendly rating. Most cheeringly, he's broadened his palette without any attendant loss of character or detail. Note how Grace's mumpy Jack Skellington face illuminates when presented with an engagement ring attached to a chipolata, and the casting of Nick Cave as a horny postman; you can't fail to miss the minor miracle of the final movement, which is all the more moving for arriving at such hard-won happiness. As with life, sometimes you need to push on through: this is one of those endings that redeems a few earlier wobbles, and Elliot tops it with a seven-word statement of ChatGPT-era defiance tucked away at the very end of his closing credits: "This film was made by human beings." I mean it as a compliment when I say that it feels like it.

Memoir of a Snail is now playing in selected cinemas.

Progressions: "I'm Still Here"


The new Walter Salles film,
I'm Still Here, has the feel of a lockdown pet project not unlike Spielberg's The Fabelmans: popular history, a return to the moment of the filmmaker's youth, an attempt to evoke through domestic detail what it was to live in a particular place at a particular time. The difference is that instead of the relatively carefree and liberal-minded West Coast of the 1950s, Salles is revisiting his native Brazil as it was in 1970, under military dictatorship. Meet the Paivas: a large, well-to-do (real-life) family, living visibly untouched by the ways of this world in a spacious ocean-facing property in Rio as the decade begins. Junior clan members hang out at the beach, adopting a dog that wanders onto court during a volleyball game. Dad Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman now working as an architect, busies himself with blueprints for a new Brazil in his study. His wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) leaves the domestics running this household to express mild concern about the eldest of her especially beauteous daughters drifting into student politics. It's all sun and fun, for the most part: period 45s on the record player, Kodachrome recreations of back-garden home videos. Then, having drawn us into this world and these lives with great skill, Salles allows us to feel the rupture when men with guns show up at the family's front door, and proceed to redirect everybody into another film altogether.

I'm Still Here's quiet strength is that, even deep into its final reel, it keeps moving forwards in this way. That initial portrait of haute-bourgeois complacency shades into a tense sketch of a house under siege, the doors and curtains that once let the sunshine in suddenly, definitively closed. Expansive familial togetherness - the fond observation of life around the breakfast table - is overtaken by a mounting sense of division, enforced solitude and private grief. From an ensemble piece, the film develops into a character study centred on Eunice, a moneyed woman forced into the position of becoming first a political prisoner, then a seeker of justice as her husband is disappeared for reasons unknown. Already much-nominated (and sometimes garlanded) this awards season, Torres gives the kind of performance you often see holding not just movies but entire families together, and yet Salles permits her, too, room to move: to progress beyond the loftiness of a society dame to something rueful yet resilient, a Mother Courage obliged to track her husband while simultaneously picking her kids up from school. Here, the film begins to settle closer to the arthouse centreground, but it's always absorbing and involving: it aces the period detail, and Salles ensures all the kids - and even those cast for one or two scenes as thugs or jailers - have a distinct personality, even as he turns his attention to the bigger political picture. Doubtless this is a Brazilian film that could only have been made with the social changes of the last few years, and the defiance in that title extends beyond that of the characters: Salles counters the horrors of the State with basic humanity, and shows that resistance is often a matter of pressing on, of living and growing in the face of those who would oppress you. Subtly, without making undue fuss, I'm Still Here enters into conversation with events north of the border heading into 2025.

I'm Still Here opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

Sunday, 16 February 2025

In memoriam: Tony Roberts (Telegraph 14/02/25)


Tony Roberts
, who has died aged 85, was a bounding stage and screen performer who achieved cinematic immortality with his performance as Rob, debonair actor-confidant to Woody Allen’s neurotic Alvy Singer in the Oscar-winning
Annie Hall (1977). 

This double act took some while to click. Roberts had been cast in Allen’s 1966 play Don’t Drink the Water, but only after he’d auditioned four times and a reluctant Allen had been sent by producers to see the actor in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park: “After the show one night, Woody walks in to my dressing room with his then-wife, Louise Lasser, and says, ‘You were great. How come you’re such a lousy auditioner?’ I still don’t have a good answer for that. But I got the part.” 

Professional relationship begat fully-fledged friendship after the pair worked on Allen’s 1969 stageplay Play It Again, Sam, where Roberts was Tony nominated for playing the cuckolded Dick Christie, and on Herbert Ross’s 1972 film adaptation, which reunited the original cast.

If Annie Hall’s Rob was set a low bar – to present as smoother than Allen’s worrywart – the tall, bearded and sporting Roberts effortlessly cleared it, suggesting a creative with broad shoulders and tricks up his sleeve besides: at one point, Rob adds canned laughter to his own show, much to Alvy’s horror. Writing in The New York Times, Christopher Isherwood felt Allen cast Roberts to “epitomise suave charm in contrast to his own hapless shrubbery”.

Further collaborations ensued. In Stardust Memories (1980), Roberts was the moustachioed, Playmate-dating Tony; in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), he was the patient-bedding doctor. He went uncredited in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) as the former writing partner of Allen’s Mickey; cameoed as a gameshow host in Radio Days (1987); and returned for Sounds from a Town I Love (2001), a short Allen directed for a post-9/11 benefit concert.

Though Roberts worried about alpha-male typecasting, he delighted in offering his pal some perspective, off-camera as on. In a 2016 interview, he recalled being burgled while shooting Annie Hall: “[Woody] said, ‘Did they get the script?’ I said, ‘Who cares, you have a million [scripts] lying around.’ About a week later, they found it in a garbage pail a mile away. It was my pleasure to make him aware that [the thieves] thought the script was garbage.”

He was born David Anthony Roberts in Manhattan on October 22, 1939 to radio announcer Ken Roberts and his wife Norma (née Finkelstein), an assistant to Popeye cartoonist Ken Fleischer. He studied speech and theatre at Northwestern University before making his Broadway debut in 1962’s Take Her, She’s Mine.

Haphazardly called upon to replace Robert Redford’s understudy in Barefoot in the Park, he landed his first Tony nomination in 1968 for the musical comedy How Now, Dow Jones. Two hit musicals drawn from Billy Wilder comedies followed, 1968’s Promises Promises, derived from Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), and 1972’s Sugar, inspired by Some Like It Hot (1959).

Roberts’ film debut was Disney’s The Million Dollar Duck (1971), but more memorable projects ensued. He smoked joints with Al Pacino in Serpico (1973) and played New York’s deputy mayor in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974); briefly, he absconded to France, guesting in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s hit comedy Le sauvage (Lovers Like Us, 1975) alongside Catherine Deneuve.

Dud horror Amityville 3-D (1983) sunk any leading man ambitions, but he found renewed success onstage: as the womanising Dr. Dorn in a 1992 revival of The Seagull; as Cornell Todd in the 1995 Broadway reworking of Victor/Victoria, alongside Julie Andrews; as Buddy in a 1998 revival of Sondheim’s Follies; and as Herr Schultz in a 2003 production of Cabaret.

Roberts’ final theatrical role was in a 2009 run of Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family, which he completed after suffering a seizure during previews. He appeared several times (in several roles) in the various Law & Order franchises, before making a final screen appearance in the TV remake of Dirty Dancing (2017).

A 2015 memoir, Do You Know Me?, was titled for the way strangers recognised the actor without being able to place him – a very different kind of fame from Allen’s notoriety. Interviewed a year earlier, Roberts mulled how he now related to the man who helped make him so familiar: “There have been times when I wished I was him. I would like to have his gift and his genius and his brain… That’s a pleasure to be around. I wouldn’t want his deeper neuroses, but I don’t think he’d want mine.”

Roberts married Jennifer Lyons in 1969 before divorcing in 1975; he is survived by a daughter, Nicole Burley.

Tony Roberts, born October 22, 1939, died February 7, 2025.

Saturday, 15 February 2025

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of February 7-9, 2025):

1 (new) Dog Man (U)
2 (1) A Complete Unknown (15) **
3 (2) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)
4 (new) Macbeth (12A)
5 (new) September 5 (15) **
6 (5) The Brutalist (18) ***
7 (4) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)
8 (new) Becoming Led Zeppelin (12A)
9 (3) Companion (15)
10 (8) Moana 2 (U) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

 
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Moana 2 (U) ***
2 (4) Venom: The Last Dance (15)
3 (2) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **
4 (new) Nosferatu (15) ***
5 (3Gladiator II (15) ***
6 (5) Kraven the Hunter (15)
7 (7) The Wild Robot (U) **
8 (re) Terrifier 3 (18)
9 (re) The Last Voyage of the Demeter (15)
10 (8) Conclave (12) ****


My top five: 
1. Speak No Evil


My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Surge (Sunday, BBC Two, 11.50pm)
2. Quo Vadis, Aida? (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.25am)
3. The Quiet Girl (Monday, Channel 4, 12.10am)
4. While We Watched (Wednesday, Channel 4, 2.45am)
5. The Best Man [above] (Friday, BBC One, 12.25am)

Thursday, 13 February 2025

Bigpants strikes again: "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"


So help me, she's back: Britfilm's own Michael Myers, the postergirl for Richard Curtis monoculture, the drippiest creation in all 21st century cinema, the most regrettable legacy of Tony Blairs' New Labours, up to and including the second Gulf War. Nine years on from
Bridget Jones's Baby, which dropped in the year of Brexit (had we not suffered enough?), Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is back, squinty or grinning, sometimes squinty and grinning, her babies (plural now) in their early schoolyears. Their father, the other Mr. Darcy, is a goner, alas: Colin Firth judged there's more fun to be had reinvestigating the Lockerbie bombing, though he's one of several familiar faces making a ghostly cameo early on as Mad About The Boy strives to remind us of this franchise's former (ahem) glories. Drifting in to deliver a line or two in our heroine's Darcyless and child-strafed but nevertheless well-appointed and semi-aspirational kitchen: Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent as Bridget's ma and pa, those wacky pals (Sally Phillips, James Callis et al.) who in 2001 resembled some Anglo equivalent of those aggravating twats in millennial Doritos ads, Neil Pearson from Drop the Dead Donkey, and - of course - the big pants. Remember them? Garlic bread?! Low bar though this is, it is, all told, the most intriguing set-up as there's been for a Bridget Jones movie. Is Bridget, plunged into middle-aged solitude and stalked through her nothingy life by all these ghosts from her past, actually, literally going mad? Will the series come to an end with the nation's favourite nincompoop committing some terrible, unforgivable atrocity in the Oliver Bonas on Hampstead High Street?

No, she just needs a shag. That's what Mad About the Boy invites its audience to speculate on for two hours: who will be next to fill up the empty squinty lady? (Both short-term and full-time applicants sought.) We learn that Bridget is now on Tinder, because there's apparently nothing funnier than hearing a small child asking "Mummy, what's Tinder?" And in the non-virtual world, the contenders assemble. Hugh Grant's Daniel Cleaver is up for it - when was he not? - but settles for serving as a willing babysitter and the one interesting figure in the whole movie: an aging roué/sex pest facing up to the notion of dying alone, a craggy character actor stuck in a piffling pantomime, the only person associated with this franchise to have evolved in any dramatic and tangible way. His romantic rivals this time out are far less compelling. Chiwetel Ejiofor has to tone down everything (save his abs) as the science teacher Mr. Wallaker, whose only identifiable characteristic is "possesses own whistle". When Bridget gets stuck up a tree on the Heath (oh Bridget, that's so Bridget), she's rescued by Leo Woodall, the childproofed Michael Pitt from One Day and that dull maths show no-one's watching on Apple. There's even a scene where the hunky guy behind a cafe counter asks Bridget whether she wants to go for a drink, and she says "no thank you, I've got a boyfriend", only - get this! - he was talking about adding a drink to her Meal Deal! Cringe! Squint! Oh Bridget/That's so Bridget!

Imbecilic as much of this is, you can at least see what the intention is: to do something positive and non-judgmental with late-life sex and older woman-younger man romance, like a version of 2022's Good Luck to You, Leo Grande emptied of all insight. That film's Emma Thompson recurs here as Bridget's gynaecologist and general voice of common sense; one of her scenes still ends with Bridget's daughter trying to pronounce the word "syphilis". (That's so Bridget's daughter.) Michael Morris, taking a promotion that feels like a demotion after his work on Better Call Saul and the Oscar-nominated To Leslie, does a worse job of directing than even the first and third film's Sharon Maguire. It's not his fault he's working from an artlessly episodic script that shows no more idea of how TV and the media work than the first movie and invests all these relationships with zero depth and weight. It is his fault, and the fault of some deeply perfunctory, point-and-shoot lensing, that Mad About the Boy emerges as just about the one Britfilm of the past fifteen years that apparently hasn't a clue how to make London - Hampstead, even - look attractive. (He makes Richard Curtis seem like Stanley Kubrick: I wasn't expecting a 2025 release to remind me so forcefully of Truffaut's waspish comment about British cinema being a contradiction in terms, but here we are.) His needledrops - one means by which a director could pump some life and fun into these frames - are persistently unimaginative: Dinah Washington (as per the title) after Woodall jumps into a pool to rescue a dog, Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" over a middle-class knees-up, a John Lewis cover of Erasure's "A Little Respect" when Bridget is Sad. (Sit through the end credits at your peril: a Robbie Williams swing number lurks in wait.) Mostly it's people you know off the telly being caught with their shirts off or their pants (big or otherwise) down, like binging a season of The Brittas Empire with far fewer laughs; it's going straight-to-streaming in the US, which may end up being the sanest decision taken during the second Trump administration. I'm guessing there was a lot of free alcohol flowing before the UK press screenings, judging from the inexplicably glowing reviews, which themselves betray flickers of Trumpish protectionism. Bridget Jones is a witless dullard, but she's our witless dullard; the films made in her name may be shite, but they are, unmistakably, our shite.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy opens in cinemas nationwide today.

Tuesday, 11 February 2025

Playtime: "Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!"


We rejoin Bollywood in much the same position as Hollywood eighteen months ago, having to reissue established titles to fill a gap while the industry sorts itself out. The situation is pretty dire, all told: despite a raft of new releases in the first month-and-a-half of 2025, not one has broken into the UK Top 10, and on the list of the lowest ten opening weekends of the year so far, fully seven spots are occupied by Indian films. (The audience that abandoned the multiplex for the sofa and streaming services during lockdown isn't coming back in any hurry.) For Valentine's Day, we're getting 1994's
Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, as savvy a choice of revival as any. Headed up by two major stars in their pomp, this studio-bound fairytale from writer-director Sooraj Barjatya was a runaway hit upon its first run, opening in the interval between Jurassic Park and Titanic and doing almost as much business as either. (I have a vivid memory of seeing the title in local cinema listings week in week out for months, without ever really knowing what it was.) Clearly, distributors are relying on the nostalgia factor, treating the audience as errant children who need to be tempted outside with the colour, songs and light fun the industry appears to have forsaken in putting today's stars in drab military khaki and having them repeatedly pledge fealty to a flag.

By contrast to those frowningly serious undertakings, the opening stretch of Barjatya's film - and, indeed, much of what follows - has the look of Saturday morning kids' TV. A jovial cricket match, overseen by a dog in an umpire's chair (meet Tuffy, played by an Indian Spitz called Redo, who somehow negotiated a full-screen opening credit for himself); twentysomething performers, playing far, far younger; a woman in a sweatshirt bearing the legend "BUM CHUMS", which is certainly a choice, if not perhaps a label that could take off outside India. A sort-of plot emerges. Two brothers from one family, two sisters from another, all under the thumb of parents pairing them up, if not necessarily with the urgency Salman Khan's Prem and Madhuri Dixit's Nisha would prefer. Predominantly, however, Barjatya sets these characters to gameplaying: the cricket is followed by snooker, pass the parcel (or toss the pillow), hide the shoes, lots and lots of Tuffy ("he never bites, he only loves") doing tricks on his hindlegs, riddles (of which that title - translated as Who Am I to You? - is one, solved in the final seconds), friendship and loyalty tests, and even some kind of kd lang-ish drag act in the queer-coded musical number "Didi Tera Devar Deewana". Its appeal in 2025 is pure escapism. HAHK might well have seemed unlike anything else in cinema in 1994 - lest we forget, the year of Speed, Sátántangó and Through the Olive Trees - clinging as it did to the same devotional songs Hindi films had been singing for a half-century or more and broad comedy interludes (a salt/sugar mix-up; Tuffy supping from a bottle of Thums Up; a baby peeing on someone's dress) intended to tickle all corners of the family unit. An hour in, with a lot of this business going on and no immediate sign of a story developing, you realise the film has had to be made behind closed studio doors - much as, say, Meet Me in St. Louis was - to detach its action almost completely from the rigours and demands (not to mention the gravity) of reality.

HAHK is one of those rare films where its most passionate fans and most vocal detractors agree entirely on what it is (childish); what matters is whether you mind that it takes place in cloud cuckoo land, or that the final-act complication could have been prevented by the simple installation of a stairguard. (It's what happens when the fully grown adults in a movie are set to behaving like toddlers.) The worst I'm prepared to say about Barjatya's film is that its Quality Street aesthetic now looks like a basic version of what Sanjay Leela Bhansali was just beginning to layer up and finesse, by toning down the dayglo greens and pinks and introducing darker shades to the dramatic palette. Like the Cadbury's products the sweet-toothed Nisha can be sporadically seen munching on, this is a confection, working from a story that often seems to have been made up by sugar-giddied youngsters: two hours of mucking about and dressing up, followed by a gabbled hour of conflict premised on the idea that Prem and Nisha are obvious, ready playmates. That innocence continues to beguile, nevertheless. Here's a reminder of a time when Salman, latterly a gruffly adenoidal action figure, was but a goofy prince prepared to sing "it's my first love/It's the first time"; when Mads, introduced on rollerskates (!), was the dancing queen of Bollywood; and when Hindi film was still in fond conversation with its inner child, rather than handing him a rifle and packing him off to cadet college. Getting folks back into cinemas - regaining the audience's trust - may well require such baby steps.

Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! returns to selected cinemas from Friday.

Monday, 10 February 2025

Homework: "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles"


An admission: I felt a vague pang of sadness upon hearing that Chantal Akerman's 1975 work 
Jeanne Dielman... had been voted Sight & Sound's Greatest Film of All Time in 2022. It wasn't that the great white men of film history - represented by Hitchcock and Welles with former GOATs Vertigo and Citizen Kane - had finally been toppled by a (white) woman: in the 21st century, we know enough to know great films can come from anywhere. It was partly residual trauma from an undergraduate screening of Akerman's 1974 film Je tu il elle, organised by a well-meaning professor who thought it a wise idea to expose restless 19-year-olds to the tale of a morose woman who spends eighty minutes flopping around on a filthy mattress. (The sound of seats flipping up, and the departing abuse shouted at the screen, will haunt me forever.) Mostly, it was that this coronation confirmed something I'd suspected for a while: that the days of film being a great popular artform were over; that the cinema was now a niche concern, the preserve of academics, something we pallid nerds talk about among ourselves behind closed doors. I can imagine pressing a DVD of Vertigo or Citizen Kane on a novice and trying to persuade them of those films' greatness. I can't with Jeanne Dielman..., or at least I can't without also providing that novice with a fifty-foot stack of contextualising material, mitigating circumstances, additional reading. The newcomer may still be engaged, stirred or thrilled by those earlier American entertainments, whether by their stories or by how those stories are told, but some large part of Jeanne Dielman... specifically intends to do the viewer's head in. The pleasure principle that governed moviegoing and moviewatching for well over a century is here replaced by something more punitive and accusatory, and naturally it's only the hardcore cinephile - possessed of that masochistic streak that carries he or she away from others and into the solitude of darkened rooms for long stretches - who dares to lap it up, recommend it, label it the best of the best.

So: let the contextualisation commence anew. Reissued as the flagship of the BFI's present Akerman season, this was the 25-year-old director at the midpoint of the 1970s - that decade in which feminist theory rapidly developed into active practice - determining to make a film that went further than ever before in what it said and showed about a woman: in this case, a middle-aged, middle-class woman (Delphine Seyrig), found at the address of the title; sex worker by day, single mother to a teenage son by night, a prisoner in her own home at almost all times. The directorial approach was there in the title: a prevailing desire to go into extreme, pedantic detail, generating extended sequences of our heroine cooking and cleaning mindlessly, going through the same old deranging routines day in day out. You've got three-plus hours of this, whether you like it or not, so settle in. When Jeanne takes a bath, Akerman shoots her scrubbing every part of her anatomy, and then - the kicker - struggling to turn the tap off. We get fully fifteen minutes of her preparing breakfast one morning; and you should see the meal she makes of a bag of potatoes. (British viewers of a certain age will spend some of this sequence wondering whether Smash would have been available in Brussels in 1975.) The point is that the film is exactly what it shows - hard work, with not much in the way of reward - and it demands a permanently frowning gaze from director and viewer alike. A structuralist landmark like Michael Snow's Wavelength (another unruly undergraduate discovery) could work in a kind of joke by including conventional movie activity - a murder - but keeping it largely off-camera. Jeanne, by contrast, has nothing going on around her, no interests, no real friends or confidantes; she exists simply to keep a dead zone neat and tidy, until she snaps and it gets messy. If you want murder done properly, maman tells us, do it yourself.

The one concession Akerman makes - and here, Jeanne Dielman... represents a quantum leap forwards from the scratchy, primitive experimentalism of Je tu il elle, the work of an emergent dissident still gathering her words, thoughts and images - is that she's prepared to teach us how to watch the film. With the action being by and large so perfunctory, we're obliged to fall back on mise-en-scène, to try and puzzle out how these rooms fit together, what's really being performed (big hint: it's bourgeois domesticity), what that odd flashing light is in the Dielmans' front room. Akerman schools us in this very quickly. One of Jeanne Dielman...'s virtues is that it often feels pacier than some 90- or 120-minute films we've all seen, because there's always something for the heroine to do, so Sisyphean is her domestic labour. The food gets eaten; the endlessly remade beds slept in. The sex work that might have offered some form of variation is itself described as a drudge, on the occasions we see any of it, but it's the one aspect of this life that isn't dwelled on at any length. It puts food on the table and keeps a roof over this head, but is no more of a source of pleasure - for her, or for those of us looking on - than anything else Akerman puts on screen. We are, then, set for something more overtly dramatic to happen; it does, eventually, but it involves going a long way around the houses (and around this house in particular) to get there, and even then the film leaves Jeanne and us stranded: her final act is a dead end in a location Akerman has left us in little doubt is itself a dead end. What may be surprising is how influential these dead ends have been. Watching Jeanne Dielman... this far into the 21st century, you can very clearly see its impact on such refusenik directors as Michael Haneke (the long, fixed shots, the reframing of the domestic space as a potential deathtrap, the desire to impress something on the audience, to poke or provoke us out of our passivity), Catherine Breillat (the weaponising of downtime, the spiralling-out into madness and murder) and numerous other contemporary filmmakers with whom you may have a passive-aggressive, love-hate relationship.

It's possibly also inspired those juniors who've recently centralised women's lives and work, although that claim is complicated by Jeanne Dielman...'s somewhat ambiguous relationship with its own protagonist. It's unclear even from these 201 minutes whether Akerman really likes or empathises with Jeanne, with her narrow little life and trad-wife concerns. Look at the tepid smile Akerman permits Jeanne when she hears her boy returning home; or the fact Seyrig has been asked to portray a vacuum (in both senses of the word), someone emptied out and finally exhausted by the demands of her daily tasks; or the comparative liveliness of those Jeanne encounters on her rounds. (A cameoing cobbler all but comes over as Bob Hope in this context, but presumably he has a wife to turn down the covers every morning.) For three-plus hours, Akerman is constantly telling us not to be this type of woman, so obsessed with and consumed by domesticity that she has nothing else going on in her life or between her ears. In this respect, Jeanne Dielman...'s newfound GOAT status represents a less radical disruption of the canon than it at first appears: I'm far from certain Hitchcock and Welles had entirely flattering things to say about "Scottie" Ferguson and Charles Foster Kane, obsessed with and consumed by Kim Novak and power respectively - and those filmmakers were far closer in spirit to their subjects than Akerman is to hers. One reason these films appeal to critics is that they are, fundamentally, critical. (It never ceases to amaze me how many of our most acclaimed films are formed of negative images.) For everybody else: Jeanne Dielman... stands a landmark of sorts, a beacon set by a woman atop an especially arduous hill in the hope other women will see the light. It is deliberately ungenerous, programmatic, repetitive, depressive, monotonous, extenuated, dull and no fun whatsoever, but it is still all of those things - and that's the perversion the pollsters and cognoscenti have so triumphantly embraced, cinephilia having become no more, in the bigger picture, than its own form of perversion, hidden from sight in the darker corners of the Internet. I wouldn't go so far as to call it the greatest film of all time, but it remains, like the housework it so assiduously witnesses and condemns as a crime, a pretty formidable timesuck.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is now showing in selected cinemas.