Street With No Name
Was fortunate enough to pick a copy of the Criterion Collection’s DVD of JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES for cheap. I haven’t watched it yet, but not having seen the films never stopped Michael Parkinson reviewing CARAVAGGIO and FLESH AND BLOOD when he hosted FILM ’86, so I feel fully qualified to write about it.
Really my thoughts are more tangential to the film (well, they’d kind of have to be) — I was wondering what other films would benefit from including not only a character’s name, but their full postal address. It’s a pressing question.
You could have FRANKENSTEIN, THE SCARY WINDMILL LABORATORY, NR. INGOLSTADT. The Roger Ebert lookalike star of UP could have his street address as well as that Peruvian plateau he winds up on. And THE SEARCHERS, NO FIXED ABODE has a certain ring to it. Since Fassbinder made films which have people’s names (VERONIKA VOSS) and addresses (BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ), we could save a lot of time by grafting them together. ROSA LUXEMBURG has the advantage of being a name and an address.
Further suggestions?
Chantal Akerman herself, of course, lives in the splendour of her Chantal Akermansion.
March 23, 2010 at 10:41 am
You are in for a treat – JEANNE DIELMAN is one of the great films of the 70s, and easily the best thing Chantal Akerman has done. Delphine Seyrig is as riveting as a suburban housewife/hooker as she is as an exotic grande dame in LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD or DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS. What a film, what an actress! Incomparable!
March 23, 2010 at 11:13 am
Though beware that the camera doesn’t move much in this one either!
March 23, 2010 at 11:36 am
It is an absolutely fantastic film – I like the way that the ‘shocking’ stuff (and the unsexy nude scene in the bath) gets thrown out there very early on and then you have the time to forget in order to occasionally get reminded of it at later moments throughout the film.
It is a film about routines and how the slightest variation can throw your life off balance completely. Where the miniscule fraction of a second you see a worried look or a brief smile cross a face makes the five minute potato peeling scene more than worth it.
Meaningless tasks or tasks full of meaning because they are performed for the maintenance of a lifestyle, of a family?
It is a film of long moments of nothingness, but that nothingness is vitally important in itself. It is what life is made of – the transitional moments from one ‘significant event’ to another – and if those moments of ‘nothing’ were removed, it would be more difficult to understand or empathise with the actions of the character (or maybe we would empathise or understand in a different way, which raises questions about filmmaking and manipulation inherent in editing, directing, performances structured to fit a certain amount of time, or into a shot framed a certain way etc)
It is also to a certain extent about how much you can ever get an insight into characters actions. Not just those of Jeanne (though he major act at the end of the film lead me to recontextualise the film through that perspective, but is that just a superficial reading in itself? Smugly assuming that I’ve ‘understood’ her motivations as a way of closing the book on the film and the character?) , but also the people she meets.
For example at one point her son asks her for money for school – he seems mollycoddled and grasping every penny she can make (though are we more sensitive to his casual request for money that he will only fritter away because we have seen how Jeanne earns her money?) Yet the next day he doesn’t ask for any money at all and we have seen enough of him at this point to know that he loves his mother. Was I too quick to rush to judgment at first, only to see the ‘truth’ later? Or have the tables been turned and the film is looking back at me, playing with my projections onto the characters?
I initially felt that one of the flaws of the film was that many people go through situations like this without ending as Jeanne does. If this is a ‘three days in the life’ documentary, which it most definitely is not (it is rigidly structured with specific character moments), then I’d want to know how long Jeanne was involved with this, whether she’d been in this routine for years before, or months or days. Surely this would modify my attitude towards, and sympathy for, the character (after all people live their whole lives in worse situations, and accomodating worse events into their daily routines without ending as Jeanne does). But then I also feel that this is the point of the film – that choosing where to begin and end a story can be arbitrary and affect attitudes towards the characters. Even making a three and a half hour film does not escape that limitation (but also fascinating element) of cinema.
And it also has one of the greatest endings and sustained shots of a film, as that previously annoying fluorescent sign out of the window becomes essential to the composition and to the psyche of someone who destroys her life to retain her routine.
March 23, 2010 at 1:40 pm
What a hideous living room!
March 23, 2010 at 1:59 pm
I’m sure you’re aware that Forrest J. also had an Ackermansion. Would’ve been a fun place to visit while he was alive. Have no idea what the interior of Chantal’s looks like.
March 23, 2010 at 2:24 pm
David E – agree with you about the vileness of the living room, but at least it suits the characters and setting to perfection.
Unlike much of the interior decoration (and costuming) in Chabrol’s films of the 70s, which is just gratuitously hideous!
March 23, 2010 at 3:37 pm
I’m sorry, I have to know what Parky said about those films, sounds ridiculous.
March 23, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Don’t want to pull this off topic, but I was looking at the new Warner Archive entries, and they’re now selling a DVD starring…George Formby!
March 23, 2010 at 5:58 pm
Some possible re-titles:
JIM HALSEY, C/O JOHN RYDER, ROUTE 66
HJALMAR POELZIG, ART-DECO FORTRESS, MASS GRAVE HILL
JESSIE MARKHAM, SEATTLE OR JAMAICA?
Hm.
March 23, 2010 at 6:49 pm
TURNER, 84 POWIS SQUARE
March 23, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Nice suggestions!
Psyched to see this now. Seyrig is astonishing in Muriel, so I’m intrigued to see more of her in circumstances less glam than Marienbad. She’s an excllent clothes-horse but she’s so much more. Resnais apparently directed her quite differently from the men in Marienbad (they had to listen to his recordings of the dialogue and mimic them), he obviously knew she was something special.
Which Formby film is it? And what film/s is Jessie Markham from?
March 23, 2010 at 8:17 pm
GEORGE HARVEY BONE, HANGOVER SQUARE, LONDON
March 23, 2010 at 8:41 pm
The Formby I saw was I See Ice (1938).
March 23, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Jessie Markham = the two Anne Parillauds in Ruiz’s SHATTERED IMAGE.
March 23, 2010 at 9:41 pm
It’s a masterpiece alright. Make sure you have a double bill with Fassinder/Fengler’s WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? Aesthetically different, but achieving similar ends thematically.
FONTAINE, LYONS FORTRESS, MONTLUC (TBC).
March 23, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Sniper Kid ,Tim O’Kelly’s DRAGNET style LA home in Bogdonavitch’s TARGETS, is probably my fave of the hideous homes of filmland..
March 23, 2010 at 10:10 pm
A Man Escaped! I figured that one out.
Ah yes, Michael Parkinson. He admitted to walking out of Flesh and Blood after the sex/rape scene, a dodgy moment to be sure, but one he didn’t seem to fully understand. He said that Caravaggio showed that Jarman was mainly interested in photographing men’s bare bottoms, and based the rest of the review on the press release. There are no bare bottoms in Caravaggio, so I think it’s safe to assume he never saw it.
March 23, 2010 at 10:39 pm
More satirists of the ghastly pad: Douglas Sirk, Mike Leigh, Pedro Almodóvar and Bigas Luna.
March 23, 2010 at 11:30 pm
PAULINE/EMILIE, L’ANGLE DU HASARD, LES HALLES.
March 24, 2010 at 2:35 am
Well, I didn’t walk out of Flesh+Blood, but I did laugh like hell when Jennifer Jason Leigh cannonballed into the pool. It seemed an anachronism. Come to think of it, that’s two Rutger Hauer pictures I laughed at scenes in, the other being The Hitcher.
March 24, 2010 at 10:28 am
FLESH AND BLOOD is ghastly, brutal and barbaric – a highly accurate picture of life in Europe in the Middle Ages. It would make a great double bill with John Huston’s A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH.
March 24, 2010 at 10:34 am
And don’t forget Water Drops On Burning Rocks and Clockwork Orange for their gaudy ironically 70s styled apartments.
I shouldn’t really throw stones though since I was shocked to find the same patterned flock wallpaper we have on our hall landing at home (we inherited it with the house and it is too big a job, and I’m far too lazy, to change it for something else) turns up in the police raid on the seedy hotel in Luc Besson’s Leon! It even gets featured heavily in an empty pan from the gun toting policeman across to the door about to be kicked in, leaving me plenty of time to realise that it is the exact same pattern! The only difference being in the Besson film it is painted an ugly glossy green which ours is painted white.
mmedin, which scene of The Hitcher did you find funny? Strange that Hauer and Jason Leigh turned up in both of the films.
March 24, 2010 at 12:38 pm
The finger in the french fries is pretty much a gross-out gag. The Hitcher was one of George W Bush’s ventures into film finance.
Scorsese charts some hideous interior decoration in Goodfellas, assisted by ace designer Kristi Zea. But he disliked Married to the Mob because he felt it didn’t get the exact details right.
March 24, 2010 at 1:42 pm
There was more than one sick gag in The Hitcher, but what I found most funny was that Hauer seemed to be playing Howell’s murderous homosexual id, and that Howell looked a bit like Donny Osmond did at the time, and the thought of that made me a bit giddy. Such a mashup of references didn’t allow me to take the film very seriously. Better still, I was rooting for Hauer.
You have to remember, I’m the same person who, when seeing the cart of dead men in La Reine Margot chanted, “Bring out your dead!”.
March 24, 2010 at 1:51 pm
It would be nice to see Rutger back in something good. Sin City certainly doesn’t qualify. There’s an obscure Brit film, Simon Magus, which I should write about, and he’s wonderful in that, but that’s about ten years ago now. He should have had a much richer career than he did, but the Verhoeven years up to Blade Runner at least leave a permanent record of his courage.
March 24, 2010 at 2:54 pm
In his youth he made gay prnos that Verhoeven directed.
March 24, 2010 at 2:55 pm
March 24, 2010 at 3:54 pm
That I did not know! I guess he HAS seen things us people wouldn’t believe.
March 25, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Now Dubya is someone I could happily imagine being tied to the back of a truck.
Lowering the tone from Blade Runner:
And a guilty pleasure:
March 25, 2010 at 11:55 pm
March 26, 2010 at 10:39 am
Rutger Hauer made gay porn movies? That’s somebody’s sex fantasy come true…not mine, I hasten to add. I’ve never been able to see his appeal. Give me the lovely C Thomas Howell any day – especially in the inimitable Franco Zeffirelli kitsch fest YOUNG TOSCANINI.
March 26, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Apparently Howell’s dad was a stuntman, and he could do all his own fencing and riding for Return of the Musketeers. There was a time when such a skillset might have bought him career longevity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now… the demand for fencing has fallen off markedly.
Has anyone seen Floris, the swashbuckling TV show with which Verhoeven and Hauer made their names?
March 28, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Fencing and stunt-riding is one thing. Reciting the dialogue of YOUNG TOSCANINI with a straight face is something else again!
I have the film in Italian, and will gladly translate it one night if you don’t believe me.
March 28, 2010 at 6:00 pm
I have a Zeffirelli piece ready to post this week!
Is it as good/accurate as Young Einstein?