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Habit, "the most imperious of all masters" (Goethe), analyzed six ways from Sunday as a bomb with a 201-minute fuse. Delphine Seyrig's eponymous Belgian hausfrau, a very cool martinet in blue smocks, is introduced with her back to the camera, later on she's decapitated by the severe frame while receiving one of her johns. The noontime Belle de Jour interlude is just one more segment in an iron-clad routine of cooking, cleaning and shopping, a petit-bourgeois clockwork zigzag pitilessly recorded by Chantal Akerman. The first line, regarding the stew: "I added less water this week, maybe that's why it's better." The pot simmering on the stove, the straightening of a bedspread, the unfolding of a couch, domestic action pieces. Her owlish son reads Baudelaire at the dinner table and her friend is a disembodied voice ("People say veal has no vitamins. And fish these days can kill you"). Filmed in 90° angles, the household is the heroine's hardened nervous system, scrubbed planar arrangements suggesting rigid boxes labeled "kitchen," "living room," "bedroom." Bressonian lampoons of Julia Child, asphyxiating variations of the maid's morning duties in Umberto D. Heaven is a cup of coffee in an empty restaurant, "making love is merely a detail." Akerman's masterpiece of absences, in which a prisoner polishes the bars of her own cage until a missed hour makes the universe shift. When Jeanne burns the potatoes and halts in confusion for a second, it's a jolt—the first chink in the armor, the machine's Kubrickian short-circuit. Literally getting up on the wrong side of the bed, she loses her grip, can't get the coffee right, and faces the ultimate horror of sitting on a sofa with nothing to do. Orgasm (not a release, but the ultimate loss of control), scissors, lights out. Repulsion, That Cold Day in the Park, A Woman Under the Influence are her sisters, bloodied in the dark. Cinematography by Babette Mangolte.
--- Fernando F. Croce |