Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

 

I can't go on. I'll go on. — Samuel Beckett 

It was in the order of things 

There is a phrase that Jeanne Dielman utters almost en passant, the way one says something obvious, and yet it runs through the entire film like a blade hidden beneath the plaster: it was in the order of things. It is the phrase that closes a conversation, archives an existence, normalizes what has never had a name. It is not a momentary resignation: it is a cosmology. It is the way a subject dissolves into the order that precedes and overwhelms it, convinced that this order is reality itself, not one of its possible constructions. 

Chantal Akerman was twenty-five years old when she made this film. She had already seen enough. 

Form as a political act 

Jeanne Dielman is, above all else, a radical cinematic gesture: three hours and twenty-six minutes of fixed shots, actions filmed in real time, without ellipsis, without extradiegetic music, without psychological editing. The camera does not follow the character — it observes her. It remains fixed on the axis of the hallway cabinet, where an intermittent bluish light never stops flickering like a meaningless signal, like an anomaly no one has ever thought to correct. The eye of the camera does not sympathize, does not dramatize, does not guide the viewer's emotion: it does what an entomologist does before an insect — it observes the behaviour of a living being in its natural habitat with a patience that is not neutrality but is, on the contrary, the most uncompromising form of judgment. 

This is the point of maximum distance from Hollywood cinema and, at the same time, its most ferocious critique: classical cinema has taught us that what deserves to be filmed is what is exceptional, what breaks the norm, what accelerates impact. Akerman inverts the hierarchy: she films the work that never appears on screen, the time that is never counted, the body that is never desired but only consumed. She films domestic work with the same dignity — and the same duration — that cinema grants to duels, loves, revolutions. This formal choice is already, in itself, a political manifesto. 

Biological life as destiny 

Hannah Arendt distinguished between labor — the cyclical activity necessary for biological survival — and work and action, the superior forms of human existence through which the subject leaves a lasting mark on the world, builds meaning, participates in public life. Jeanne Dielman is trapped entirely in the first dimension. Her life is a perfectly closed cycle: she prepares, she cleans, she prepares, she cleans. She peels potatoes, cooks breaded cutlets, empties the bathtub, scrubs it with Ajax. Every gesture repeats the previous one. The body exists to allow other bodies to exist — her son, the men who pass through — without ever questioning itself, without ever asking whether it desires something beyond what it does. 

There is no contemplation. No creative idleness. No examined life in the Socratic sense. There is only the punctuality of ritual, the precision of gesture, the order of things. Jeanne does not live in time — she administers it. Her existence is a series of procedures optimized for the reproduction of the norm. In this sense, the film is a phenomenological document on the female condition as a form of structural alienation: not experienced as such — and this is the point — but internalized as identity, as vocation, as love. 

The body as occupied territory 

Jeanne's prostitution is never exhibited as scandal or moral drama. Akerman inserts it into the routine with the same impassiveness with which she inserts the polishing of shoes. This is the most disturbing gesture in the film: not the prostitution itself, but its interchangeability with everything else. The man who pays and says "see you Thursday" belongs to the same universe as the man who came home from work and expected to be served at the table. The difference between the dead husband and the afternoon client is, in Jeanne's affective and bodily economy, almost irrelevant: both occupy a body that has never had a say in its own availability. 

The dialogue with her son is revealing in this sense, and constitutes one of the moral and philosophical heights of the film. Sylvain — the silent son, who almost never speaks — breaks the silence on matters his mother cannot face. He says: "if I were a woman I could not make love with someone I don't love." She replies: "you can't know that, you're not a woman." This reply is not a simple personal defense: it is the implicit admission of an entire system of formation of female desire — or rather, of its systematic suppression. Jeanne does not say "I couldn't either." She does not say "you're right." She says he cannot know what it means to be a woman. And in that reply everything is contained: the resignation, the negation of self, the impossibility of naming one's own pain because naming it would mean being forced to see it. 

The crack in the plaster 

On the second day something cracks: the potatoes overcook, she goes to buy more. On the third day order begins to crumble from within — her hair is disheveled, the potatoes fail again, she is listless, impatient, clumsy. Then her son breaks the silence and tells her what a friend told him about sex since he was ten years old — "penetration is like a sword, the deeper the better" — and confides that as a child he used to feign nightmares to prevent his father from being with her, and that when his father died he thought it was God's punishment. She replies that one should not speak of such things. Here too: the closure is not modesty, it is survival. To speak would mean opening a crack in the order of things. And that order is the only floor Jeanne knows how to stand on. 

The third day is the silent catastrophe. Nothing explodes, nothing is declared, no crisis scene in the conventional narrative sense. And yet everything crumbles: the potatoes burned again, the body no longer responding to its habitual gestures, the clumsy polishing of shoes, the baby held in her arms who screams — as if sensing in that body something no longer reliable, something that has stopped conforming to its own function. The baby screams in Jeanne's arms and calms down only when she sets him down. It is an almost allegorical image: care itself has become intolerable, the caring body can no longer contain. 

What has happened? Nothing external. The event is interior, subterranean, unspeakable. Something — perhaps the son's words, perhaps the incessant flickering of that bluish light on the cabinet, perhaps the simple accumulation of identical days — has cracked the anesthesia. And when repetition stops functioning as an anesthetic, what emerges is not free consciousness but panic. Not freedom but the terror of an unknown interior space. 

The final gesture as a metaphysical act 

The third encounter with a man does not take place off-screen: the camera stays in the room as she removes her blouse and lies motionless beneath him. Then something happens inside her — a shudder, a gesture of shame, she covers her face. After the man lies back satisfied, Jeanne kills him with a pair of scissors. She dresses again before the mirror, impassive. She goes to sit in the living room. She waits. 

When Jeanne kills the man, she does not cry out. She does not weep. She says nothing. She dresses again before the mirror — the most ordinary gesture in the world — and goes to wait in the living room. The act is carried out with the same composure with which she peeled potatoes. And it is here that the film reaches its most vertiginous dimension: the act of violence is not an eruption of the repressed in the classical psychoanalytic sense, it is not the revenge of a victim, it is not even a declaration of freedom. It is something more ambiguous and more radical: it is the elimination of the intruder. Not of the man as such, but of what that encounter — for the first time visible, for the first time bodily in the eyes of the camera — has introduced into Jeanne's order: pleasure, or the shudder of something resembling desire, or simply the awareness of having a body that responds. 

The question the film leaves suspended — and which no interpretation closes definitively — is this: does Jeanne kill to restore order, or because order is already irreparably lost? The face covered with hands during the encounter is not the gesture of someone who discovers pleasure and accepts it — it is the gesture of someone who would prefer not to see what they are seeing in themselves. And yet she has seen it. There is no going back.
 

A manifesto that does not declare itself 

In 2022, Sight & Sound magazine placed Jeanne Dielman at the top of its ranking of the greatest films in the history of cinema — the first work by a female director to reach this distinction since the poll began in 1952. The decision provoked controversy: some spoke of political correctness, others evoked the risk of an ideological revision of cinema history. These controversies are, in a certain sense, the most eloquent proof of the film's necessity. 

Jeanne Dielman is not a feminist manifesto in the rhetorical sense — it does not declare, does not accuse, does not propose. It is something more insidious and more lasting: it is a perceptual structure. It forces the viewer — any viewer — to inhabit the time of an existence that cinema has always skipped over. And in that time, in that implacable duration, it reveals what the speed of classical editing was designed to conceal: that invisible work is work, that the available body is a political territory, that the normalization of female sacrifice is not nature but culture — and a culture that continues, that changes form but not essence. 

The film meets — and precedes — the cinema of Michael Haneke, the subterranean violence of Caché, the familial oppression of Miss Violence by Alexandros Avranas. An implacable formal coherence: that fixed camera which never grants the viewer the alibi of emotional distance nor the comfort of guided identification. Akerman places us before Jeanne as one places a mirror before a wall: what we reflect is not a character, but a social structure. 

The intermittent bluish light on the cabinet never stops flickering. It never has. 

"It was in the order of things." And in that phrase lies the entire history of what women have been asked to accept as destiny — and of what, one day, ceased to be acceptable without anyone having yet found the words to say so. 

Remain seated at your table and wait. Don't even wait — be still and alone. The world will offer itself freely to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will writhe before you in rapture. — Franz Kafka