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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

“A singular work in film history,” begins the description on back of the case of Criterion’s long-awaited DVD release of Chantal Akerman’s astounding 1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. That is no hyperbole. Jeanne Dielman is a painstaking, excruciatingly exacting portrait of the life of a perfectly organized homemaker, an epic portrait of a quotidian life where every gesture through the 200-minute study becomes important and the slips in routine reverberate like aftershocks of an earthquake. It’s astounding to realize that Akerman was only 25 when she put this uncompromising vision on the screen. It’s almost as astounding that this landmark work took so long for finally arrive on home video in any form in the U.S. Almost impossible to see for decades (it wasn’t even released in the U.S. until 1983 and was rarely revived in the years since), this singular work is now available to anyone with a will and a DVD player. And I’m happy to report that it has lost none of its power in the intervening years.

Middle-aged widow and single mother Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) lives a carefully structured life with a clockwork routine. She wakes up before dawn, sees her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) off to school, cleans every last dish in her tiny and spotless kitchen, then continues on with the errands and duties of her day. One of those duties just happens to be servicing an afternoon client as a part-time prostitute. Jeanne is all business when the bell rings and she puts the pot on low simmer to welcome her client for the day. It’s creepily expressive the way Akerman frames her head out of the shot when she answers the door, matching Seyrig’s inexpressive formality with each man.

Where Akerman observes Jeanne performing her tasks – cooking, cleaning, doing dishes, bathing – with unblinking attention, her camera remains outside the bedroom door. It’s a radical challenge to expectations. Convention would dictate that this is where the drama is. Akerman defies convention and jumps over the entire event in a cut, picking up with Jeanne leading her client out with all the impersonal efficiency of a secretary accompanying a visitor from a business meeting. There’s nothing titillating about it, it’s merely commerce, a necessary but distasteful part of her routine. She returns to the stove with the same dispassionate, unhurried deliberation, removes the simmering dish from the burner and puts it in a warmer for dinner. Her timing is impeccable and every reminder of her visitor is swept away by the time Sylvain returns home in time for the equally ordered evening routine. With no personal life to speak of outside the apartment (her adult interactions are limited to impersonal conversations with a neighbor and small talk with shopkeepers), her life revolves around serving her son, yet even here she is curiously removed. Her body language is a mix of mother hen affection and headmistress efficiency, but her voice remains distant, an emotionless monotone, whether she’s helping him with his homework or telling him the story of how she met his late father.

This is the daily life of Jeanne Dielman and Ackerman observes it in exacting detail, in long takes and full frame compositions from an unmoving and unblinking camera. Cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who worked with the young director on numerous films, brings Akerman’s vision to the screen with crisp, precise images that are at once mundanely simple and bristling with tension. Against the Spartan backdrop of her cramped apartment – small, clean, austere, a living space stripped of clutter or personal touches – her every gesture becomes a part of the film’s drama and tension. It’s unaccountably entrancing, compelling, almost thrilling. The stillness, the silence, the spareness of the space all focuses the viewer on the smallest details of the activities and the exactness of the routine. It’s all so seemingly simple and direct, yet there is a beautiful play of rhythms in the editing and the performance that gives the routine the movements of a visual symphony. As we become attuned to that routine, Akerman jars us with the first skipped note.

Delphine Seyrig offers a fully defined portrait of a woman who rarely lets her feelings show through the impenetrable mask of impersonal politeness she applies every morning along with her impeccably applied make-up and perfectly coiffed hairdo; there’s nary a hair out of place or a smudge on her crisply elegant wardrobe by the end of her day. Her measured, confident performance suggests the familiarity of routine turned instinct, yet she communicates a world of character through her carriage, her body language and the rhythm of her movement, and she shows the cracks in her façade with the subtlest of shifts. When the mask drops, she reveals a devastating absence and a panic to put it back in place and protect herself from the chaos of emotion and involvement.

Some ninety minutes into the film, Jeanne leaves the bedroom almost imperceptibly disheveled, her perfect hair out of place, her walk not as sure, and forgets to return the lid to the tureen where she keeps the household money. It’s a major disruption in her clockwork perfection and the first suggestion that her orderly routine is about to dramatically unravel. “The ritual is what holds her life together,” Akerman explains in an interview on the Criterion DVD. Akerman doesn’t draw our attention to the slips in Jeanne’s routine; there are no close-ups to telling clues or musical stings to alert us (in fact, there is no music at all apart from a little classical listening during the prescribed radio time in the evening). It’s the increasingly jarring hiccups to the rhythm of the film and the confidence exuded by Seyrig’s Jeanne that draws our attention to such breaks, a testament to the precision of her filmmaking and the brilliance of her conception.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is an epic portrait of a life that has rarely been seen on screen – three days in the routine of a homemaker in just under three and a half hours. The rhythms of the routine, the integrity of time within the long takes and exactingly sculpted sequences, the slow unraveling of the confidence and perfection of her timetable is an essential part of the experience of the film. While this is obviously not real time, Akerman makes a point of observing her activities – the very details that other films ignore – without cutting away or compressing the time, focusing our attention on the most minute details of her activity by paring away everything else. Even the soundtrack is pared down to the percussion of her activity (footsteps on the floor, the clank of dishes, the whistle of the kettle) while the exterior buzz of the apartment building elevator and the low rumble and faraway horns of traffic on the street below provides the ambient backbeat. This is the business of housewifery in exacting detail, but it is also portrait of a woman who has defined herself by her routine, carefully removing any emotional connection to the world. Both formally exacting and highly stylized, it’s both a bold redefinition of “realism” and a radical, unprecedented approach to presenting the lives of women on screen.

Nikkatsu Noir

Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film studio, was the home of Japan’s wildest crime dramas and gangster thrillers of the sixties. Whether or not the five Japanese gangster films in the Nikkatsu Noir box set from Eclipse are true noirs is debatable, but they are lively B-movie artifacts from the wild and weird era of Nikkatsu’s glory days of crime movie programmers, when the mob movie rats (like Seijun Suzuki) ran wild through the genre.

It’s no surprise that the Suzuki contribution to the set is the most visually and stylistically dynamic, which is not necessarily to say it’s the best. Take Aim at the Police Van (1960) has a great title, a dynamic opening scene (which, no surprise, begins with a police prisoner transport bus sighted through a rifle scope) and a thoroughly routine detective plot that Suzuki turns into a hot-blooded crime conspiracy thriller featuring kidnapped girls, punk snipers, a stripper killed with an arrow to the breast, a paroled criminal tossed off a cliff, faked deaths, hidden agendas and a prison guard (Michitaro Mizushima) turned dogged investigator trying to piece it all together. In classic crime movie fashion, the bad guys don’t just shoot the good guys, they tie them up in the cab of a gas tanker, let the brake off and send it down a hill trailing gasoline, and light a match to the trail. Given the incendiary dimensions of the scene, I’m particularly impressed that the victims use a lighter to try and burn through the ropes before the fire catches up to the tanker. Mizushima has a real straight-arrow presence amidst the cast of crazed killers, colorful small-time crooks and wild girls, but he has the personality to hold his own and Suzuki packs a lot into 79 minutes of black-and-white Nikkatsuscope craziness.

In fact, all the films in the set are B&W widescreen with the exception of the Koreyoshi Kurahara’s moody I Am Waiting (1957), the earliest film in the collection. The tale of an optimistic bar owner with dreams abroad and a beautiful runaway singer with a painful past (”I’m a canary that’s forgotten how to sing,” she explains) has an atmosphere that recalls the grim beauty of the Jean Gabin French poetic realist films of fog-wrapped port towns and pitiless villages. It’s the outskirts of Yokohama here, where handsome, helpful ex-boxer Joji (Yujiro Ishihara) rescues a pretty girl (Mie Kitahara) from a rainy coast storm and gives her a place to stay in his colorful dive of a dockside bar. They’re both walking wounded, licking their wounds from careers cut short, but it takes another shot to knock the dreams out of Joji and set him on the trail of his brother’s killer, which just so happens to lead to the gangster who has made a claim on the girl. The fog, the night scenes and the grimy port town atmosphere do wonders to keep the budget down and the mood up, but it all gets less dreamy and more tawdry as Joji goes up against the gangster thugs and battles it out in a nightclub with a floor that lights up. It’s easily the most restrained film in the set, more mood piece than action movie, which gives it a little more class than the more aggressively explosive films that follow. And a great bluesy theme song crooned like a lament.

A similarly regret-laden saloon song is crooned over the credits of Toshio Masuda’s Rusty Knife (1958), which is otherwise more gangster thriller than shadowy noir, complete with a Naked City-style opening narration explaining the culture of crime and corruption ravaging the city. As an arrogant crime boss laughs off every arrest with a hearty cackle, a crusading District Attorney pressures a former criminal (Yujiro Ishihara) trying to put his past behind him to testify, to no avail. At least not until it becomes personal, a matter of honor and revenge. There’s plenty of blackmailing and double-crosses and suicide and Jo Shishido (pre-plastic surgery, just before he became a genre icon with the puffy cheeks) gets tossed off a train, and sure enough a rusty knife is pulled out for a bout of poetic justice. Conventional all the way, to be sure, but the juvenile energy of young thug high on hush money and the city streets and abandoned lots shrouded in night give it a perfectly shadowy atmosphere.

Jo Shishido has barely a few minutes of screen time in Rusty Knife but takes the lead in the final films in the collection, with his now distinctive chipmunk-cheek look in place. (Chuck Stephens writes a bit about the curious – and strangely successful – plastic surgery that Shishido undertook to give him those puffy cheeks and set him apart from the rest of the pretty-boy action starts in the accompanying notes). Takumi Furukawa’s Cruel Gun Story (1964) drops an American B-movie heist blueprint very much like The Killing (along with flourishes of both versions of The Killers) and a romantic criminal code into a world of corporate crime bosses and dishonorable thugs. Togawa (Shishido), sprung from prison early so he can run the heist for a big business gangster leader, has reservations about the job and for good reason. He and his reliable second-in-command are stuck with a sneering junkie and a punch-drunk boxer a few knocks away from brain death. Shishido’s Togawa is a cool customer, pensive and still, always sizing up the situation, which serves him well when the perfect armored car heist hits a glitch. It’s telling that they hole up in a former American military base, now a decaying slum of rotting buildings; the American influence hovers over the entire film, a classic American crime movie in a Japanese idiom. “I need payback,” Togawa demands, just before he’s grabbed by thugs who would like nothing better than help him metes out his revenge without mercy. The brassy score powers it along with a driving beat, down into the sewers and back up into a thoroughly nihilistic ending.

The set ends in 1967 with Takashi Nomura’s A Colt Is My Passport, though if I’m not mistaken it’s actually a Baretta that is assassin Shuji’s (Shishido) handgun of choice. For his hit on an aging crime boss he uses a high powered rifle, but the killing is the last thing that goes right on this job. With the airports and docks covered, Shuji and his partner hole up in a port town truck stop while awaiting new travel plans. Once again, Shishido is the cool customer in a world of easily corruptible crooks and civilians. He trades his own life to rescue his partner, but in this world it’s apparently just fine to arm yourself to the teeth and shoot it out at your surrender. Shuji is a pretty far sighted guy; he has a second brake hidden in his getaway car and even digs himself a shallow grave for the final showdown, but he’s got other plans for it. The great spaghetti western-inspired score adds familiar Japanese instruments and jazz inflections as it progresses, becoming a real genre symphony, and Nomura pulls out all stops for the mad shoot-out in an abandoned quarry: this film’s answer to the desert plains of a spaghetti western. It ends the set on a high note and I was left high on crazy crime movie fumes. None of these are masterpieces but they are all inventive little nuggets of genre fun with energy, attitude and style, and in moments—such as the wild finale here—it’s just plain delirious.

Eclipse is Criterion’s budget-minded line of box set so there are no supplements, but Asian film expert Chuck Stephens provides brief essays with each film. Stephens has a rather overripe writing style, more expressive of his love of the films than of the films or the genre itself, but he does offer some context and background on the films and filmmakers and on the youth culture that brought younger and younger faces on to the screens.

The transfers are all fine, the earliest showing a little wear, the later ones sharper and with strong contrasts. Only Take Aim at the Police Van shows any noticeable flaws: in the master shots the image has a soft pocket in the center right, but only for long shots. Close-ups and medium shots look fine, which leads me to believe that it’s an issue with the master materials. Regardless, it’s a very minor issue and does not distract from the film. The soundtracks are strong, with only minor hiss, and the music comes through strong and clear. All in all, a real treat.

Supplemental Notes:

Criterion’s two-disc edition of Jeanne Dielman features a wealth of illuminating supplements. Delphine Seyrig champions Akerman’s vision when the two are interviewed on French TV in 1976 (it’s almost comic how the interviewer turns away from the unknown young director, who barely gets a word in after an obligatory introduction, and focuses solely on movie star Seyrig). Akerman gets her turn in a new 20-minute interview shot for the DVD in April 2009, where she remembers the origins of the film and reflects on working with Seyrig on the set. “I was writing from instinct and having to reach to explain why,” she recalls. There’s also a new interview with cinematographer Babette Mangolte discussing her collaborations with Akerman, excerpts from the 1997 program Chantan Akerman on Chantal Akerman (an episode of the long-running Cinema des Notre Temps series) with the director reflecting on her career and philosophy, Akerman’s 2007 interview with her mother Natalia Akerman, and the 1968 short Saute me ville, Akerman’s debut film.

But the most illuminating is Autour de Jeanne Dielman, a priceless 69-minute documentary shot on the set of the film on B&W videotape by actor Sami Frey. It’s riveting to watch the communication between the 25-year-old Akerman and veteran star Seyrig, the young artist going on instinct and guts, the actress trying to find her way into the character and into the film, each speaking a different language. Seyrig is fully supportive of the vision, but she demands to be directed in ways she understand and asks: “How can I play her if I don’t know all her secrets?” For Akerman, there are no secrets, which in some ways that is the secret that Akerman has to reach to explain. Meanwhile, she acts out, in exacting detail, her vision of the character. As the two artists struggle to communicate, the vision comes to life.

Published in conjunction with seanax.com.