A woman’s work is never done in Chantal Akerman’s icily deadpan, degree-zero movie from 1975, now on rerelease for its 50th anniversary. Over three hours and 20 minutes, from a sequence of fixed camera positions, it blankly transcribes the ordinary life of Jeanne Dielman, a fortysomething widowed single mother, living with her teenage son Sylvain in a modest one-bedroom apartment in central Brussels (he sleeps in a foldout sofa bed in the front room).
The flat is heavily furnished in a style that clearly dates from before the second world war, the glass-fronted dresser weirdly reflecting the flashing blue lights from the store across the street, a touch which the audience will come to notice in time and which may be a premonition of the police’s future arrival. The hours and the days go by, each like the last. Jeanne cooks, washes up, cleans, goes shopping, shines Sylvain’s shoes; sometimes she looks after a neighbour’s baby in a carrycot; she mends Sylvain’s jacket, fatefully leaving her dressmaking scissors in the bedroom. And in the afternoons, while he is out at school, Jeanne supplements the widow’s pension we see her collecting from the post office by having sex for money with gentlemen visitors who are discreetly attended to on a towel placed primly over the counterpane on what was once Jeanne’s marital bed. But her life and state of mind come to pieces – gradually, then suddenly – for reasons which we, the audience, have to supply.
