Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is really boring, I loved it

A 50th-anniversary release of Sight and Sound’s “greatest film of all time” celebrates a long, tedious masterpiece.

Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Credit: BFI

Over three hours and 20 minutes, director Chantal Akerman’s slow cinema epic

records three days in the unravelling life of Jeanne, a widowed single mother, told through small details: a button undone, a light left on, a potato overcooked.

Akerman demands her audience pay attention. She uses a fixed camera and no music to turn every decision–sugar in coffee–monumental. A three-and-a-half-minute shot of Jeanne massaging a meatloaf feels like a tense Hitchcock set piece.

Thanks to a February 50th-anniversary British Film Institute (BFI) theatrical rerelease, UK audiences could watch a real-time kettle boil restored in 2k for the big screen, something vanishingly provided by the modern blockbuster.

Jeanne Dielman is having a renaissance. After decades of public obscurity, receiving little attention beyond certain self-congratulatory cinephilia, film critics voted it the greatest film of all time, unseating Vertigo in Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll. It became the first female-directed movie to place within the top ten.

Rather predictably, a backlash followed. Some mocked critics as snobbish and out-of-touch: Oh darling, it’s supposed to be boring! Perhaps you just didn’t get it? While others chauvinistically declared the ranking a result of unearned affirmative action. Reactions ignored the film, Akerman and Jeanne entirely.

Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) lives with her teenage son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), in a very brown one-bedroom apartment in Brussels. Over the first day, we are shown her life in its rhythmic totality.

She buttons her blue housecoat and puts a towel on her bed before waking Sylvain every morning. While he’s at school she buys groceries, peels potatoes and orders the same coffee from the same table in the same café.

Each afternoon she opens the door to a different sunken, loose-skinned man and they disappear into her bedroom. The sunlight fades. He hands her money, arranges to return next week and leaves. Sylvain comes home and they eat dinner in silence.

On day three, her routine falls apart. Jeanne misses a button on her housecoat and the potatoes boil over while she’s having sex with a client. We are shown the gaps between real-time tasks: Jeanne sits and stares, her breathing becoming more ragged as the day turns.

Alongside the film’s rerelease, the BFI hosted a major retrospective on Akerman, celebrating her “extraordinary impact on contemporary cinema”. A pioneering Belgian filmmaker known for her on-screen elevations of female sexuality and domestic life, Akerman meticulously directed Seyrig’s every gesture and pause.

Tragically, the retrospective falls on another anniversary: ten years after Akerman took her own life, suffering from manic depression. She did not live to see Jeanne Dielman’s critical reappraisal. But Akerman was always more interested in everyday things than accolades. “I made this film to give all these actions typically undervalued a life on film,” Akerman said.

Without close-ups or musical lifts, Jeanne’s actions are all provided equal dramatic weight. The same stomach-churning suspense you feel as James Stewart finally confronts Kim Novak in Vertigo’s climatic bell tower scene, you feel when Jeanne frantically runs to the bathroom, deciding where to throw a pan of overcooked potatoes.

As Jeanne’s routine collapses, she is left wondering what to do and the audience, freed from a three-and-a-half hour trance, is left to form a long, orderly queue outside the cinema toilets.