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.