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.
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.
