Jeanne Dielman: Routine, Domestic Labor, and Feminist Form

WHERE JEANNE WENT WRONG

Today, in the era of boring Hollywood-Marxism blockbusters like Avatar 2 (in which the aboriginal population threatened by imperialist conquerors is composed of traditional families with clear-cut gender roles), it is quite refreshing to see a half-century-old masterpiece of European art cinema proclaimed (by the 2022 Sight and Sound poll) the best movie of all time. It is symptomatic that (like its predecessor, Vertigo) it reached the top after a long delay, thereby confirming that each present era retroactively rewrites its past. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is fourth in the series of best films, preceded by Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The film’s triumph is, of course, the result of a well-planned campaign to promote a woman to the top position. But what makes the film so refreshing today is that it so clearly belongs to another era, when feminism had not yet regressed into the empty moralist rigor of cancel culture.

Here is the film’s plot (the term is inappropriate here, since the project of the movie is precisely to undermine the standard notion of a plot): Jeanne presents a widowed mother’s regimented schedule of cooking, cleaning, mothering, and running errands over the course of three days. Even sex is part of the mundane routine she performs daily by rote; she earns money by having sex with a different client each afternoon before her son arrives home from school. After a visit from a client on the second day, Jeanne’s routine begins to unravel: She overcooks the potatoes, forgets to cover the porcelain in which she keeps her money, misses a button on her house coat, and drops a newly washed spoon. And yet, she goes on with her routine until her client arrives on the third day. After orgasmic sex with him, she dresses herself, returns to bed and stabs him to death with a pair of scissors. She then sits quietly at her dining room table.

Akerman’s stroke of genius is that she chose Delphine Seyrig to play Jeanne. Seyrig is the perfect example of French upper-class elegance; her most famous role is in Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad. In another movie, she has a wonderful anecdote that illustrates the difference between plain good manners and true elegance. If a decent man mistakenly enters a bathroom and finds a naked woman taking shower, he will say, “So sorry, lady!” and quickly withdraw. But if he possesses true elegance, he will say, “So sorry, sir!” pretending that he didn’t even notice the person in the shower was a woman and thereby minimalizing the embarrassment. Seyrig’s role in Jeanne Dielman is the very opposite of such elegance, but this contrast shouldn’t surprise us—Seyrig was one of the leading figures of French feminism.

Jeanne Dielman is not simply plotless; it follows a rather straight line of rising tension that finally explodes. “No plot” is not just no plot; the palpable absence of a plot symbolizes the feminine position in a patriarchal society, a tension between a life of empty rituals and an invisible growing rage. The implication of this straight plotline is more ambiguous than it appears. So what is it that appears? A radical condemnation of patriarchy which continues to oppress Jeanne even when a paternal figure is absent. Here is an exemplary case of such a reaction to the movie:

As the subjugated, enslaved class, women are engaged in the routinized, menial labor without which the patriarchy could not be. The entire physical and psycho-emotional substrate of the apparatus of their oppression is entirely dependent upon their daily activities. Jeanne Dielman is not about revolution or the need for revolution so much as it is about the impossibility of a life devoted to a vacuous caretaking of a patriarchal regime even in the absence of an immediate patriarch. One of the amazing feats of this film is to portray prostitution as just another task in an endless never-ending drudgery which pauses but temporarily from exhaustion and the need to sleep. Over the course of these three days, Jeanne … can no longer bear the burden of the impossible task at hand. What seemed initially like patriarchy-sanctioned “breaks for me” to have a cup of coffee or sit down once in a while are more and more moments where Jeanne can simply no longer do it.

In the film’s very last scene, Jeanne sits quietly at her dining room table in half-darkness. Here, the message is that her daily routine no longer allowed even sanctioned breaks: she had to kill a customer to be able to finally afford it. But it doesn’t really work; her face at this final moment does not express relaxation, rather, she grimaces. Finally, she is no longer following her daily rituals, which are an obsessive (compulsive-neurotic) defense against the threat of intense orgasmic enjoyment. However, in a typical mechanism of reversal, described by Freud, her ritualized defense against enjoyment turned into enjoying these defense rituals themselves. So why not have it both ways and enjoy the rituals and the sex? Because that doesn’t work—they are exclusive; it is like having a cake and eating it too. The enjoyment in Jeanne’s daily routine is clearly discerned in another reaction to the film:

Every piece of furniture in her apartment is viewed over and over, and her daily routine is so minutely reviewed that it is imprinted in the mind; so, any tiny deviation jumps out as a sinister departure portending—what? You wait worriedly to find out what it could mean. You see a perfectionist at work as she proceeds through the day, as though the great care she is taking shining and folding and washing will somehow result in safety for her and the child. There is a spirituality in this, and it begins to take hold of you, and you fervently hope for her survival.

True, but this hope is the ideological trap a viewer should avoid. The perfectionism we admire is precisely the same as that of Norman Bates who, in Psycho, after killing Marion, thoroughly cleans the bathroom to erase all the traces of her presence. In this case, we are also automatically on his side. The “spirituality” that takes hold of us as viewers is a truly weird one—the whole point of the film is to denounce it. So perhaps there is some meaning in the fact that Jeanne Dielman replaced Vertigo as the greatest film of all time.