‘People stood up and started to yell,” says Aurore Clément, remembering the day Les Rendez-vous d’Anna premiered at the Paris film festival and caused havoc. This glacial, disquieting film, which appeared in English as Meetings With Anna, follows the titular director on an odyssey around Europe that climaxes with her singing an Edith Piaf song to her lover. And that, apparently, was the final straw. “They wanted to attack me,” says Clément, who played Anna. “The journalist sitting next to me put his trenchcoat over me and got me out of there.”
The film was the third feature from Chantal Akerman, who loosely based Anna on herself. It was undoubtedly a challenging, elusive film – a series of haunted confessions heard by this film-maker protagonist from lovers, family and wayfarers while on her travels promoting an unknown work. Anna’s existential solitude, her refusal to remake herself for her lovers, was quietly radical. “People weren’t ready to accept it at the time, its feminism,” says Clément of the film, which was released in 1978. “Society was still very closed, women didn’t have much say.”
