Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

I can understand how the Sight & Sound Poll might have ranked this film on the Top of their list. Given the rules, I can see how many critics would have this film in their Top Ten. After all, every list needs an outlier, a film to cleanse the palette amongst the many genre films synonymous with this list, and JD may rise to the top in that category. When the votes are counted, this film may well be included in the majority of the ballots.

It's interesting in that JD is only one of two or three film on the list not categorized as ENTERTAINMENT, in its broadest sense. It is a philosophical piece, an art piece through and through, and it is presented very well, focusing on the external life of a woman, a mother, a widow, a prostitute, through a series of vignettes and makes no attempt to capture the internal life of the main character . In the age of social media, this film is an antidote to the INSTAGRAM/TIKTOK/FACEBOOK mindset of today. After viewing JD, I felt not so bad, in comparison, about my own life, even optimistic. In fact, I felt a sort of kinship with her watching her complete the most mundane tasks of daily living without a need for heightened emotion or personal drama. JD, of course, is not the greatest film ever made, but it may certainly be the best example of why films, like people, should not be ranked as if they were always in competition. This film, and many others like it, stands alone. (if that makes any sense).

To see during 3 and half hours a middle aged woman silently executing the same household works over and over again is one thing. But to realize that this tired looking single mother is virtually cut out of the rest of society and hardly has an occasion of interacting with her fellow citizen, except routinely visiting teenage son and occasional sexual partners, is completely another thing. Once we notice this obvious fact, every act of repetitive domestic task is suddenly becoming painful to contemplate, strangely too familiar for many of us to dismiss simply as monotonous and insipid. All depends on your sensibility to such an existence. Some might find it to be trivial, pretending every woman is more or less supposed to do so since the Creation. Others might spontaneously feel a deep sympathy for her, a prisoner of one's own occupation unable to cope with a deepening void left by the irreversible passage of time, with a growing sense of non-fulfillment.

Apparently, this cinematographic study of housewife's social condition was first intended to be politically engaging at its release, and rightly so, seeing the socio-cultural contexts of 70s. But categorizing it simply as a pioneer of feminist film making, one would miss more essential values this experimental work may embody. If we feel a lingering melancholy and a vague sorrow toward the secluded existence of the protagonist, her solitary acts of peeling vegetables, boiling water, or mechanically making love with men for living... it is probably not because this is a mere depiction of women's status which one hope to be improved in more egalitarian society. We find here something much more deep seated in the modern men's existence in general, namely the social condition of laborers trapped by a particular mode of occupation, gradually and ineluctably losing any clue of human communication as well as the conviction of one's own destiny, without really knowing why.

You've formed some habits over years of being alone, transactions that take you, towards the gloam, characteristic of your standing, excepting afternoon transplanting, it's as rigid and as set, as a millstone. A subtle change seems to upset the fine-tuned balance, it's got you searching inwardly, looking askance, the equilibrium disturbed, there are things need to be curbed, it's got you wandering around, locked in a trance.

After 30 minutes of uncomfortable fidget I started to become tuned into the monotony of Jeanne's existence and only subsequently struggled with the final half hour, although the ending perked me up. If nothing else this film has the power to get you thinking of your insignificance and, possibly, the chance of you doing something about it.

Any work of art this preposterously boring can only be considered a failure. Yup, we're going there.

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is 201 minutes of three days in the life of its titular heroine, played intentionally blank by Delphine Seyrig. That's a run time of about three and a half hours--time Akerman spends following Seyrig's Dielman around doing errands, cooking food, watching a neighbor's baby, sitting around, doing some sex work, and caring for her young adult son. Yeah, sex work is the odd one.

The film deserves credit for depicting her sex work as a clean and unsensationalized expression of self-ownership--until of course it throws that all away in the film's stupid sex-is-death conclusion and squanders the only good will it had earned with me. Dielman's relationship with her son is wrapped up in a lot of dated Freudian BS, and rings utterly hollow to those of us living beyond the 1970s. That leaves a whole lot of boring stuff, and that stuff is a whole lot of boring.

The bulk of this film consists of a static camera watching a woman do housework. It's like the much-lauded maid scene of Umberto D, but stretched across three excruciating hours. This is presumably meant to be oppressive and disturbing, and here Akerman crucially misunderstands the effect of her art on its audience: the only possible spectatorial response, so far as I can tell, is supreme disengagement. Just as I daydream when I do housework, so does my mind wander while watching Jeanne Dielman of 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles cook the potatoes. People retreat to their thoughts when they do this stuff in real life, and they retreat when you faithfully reproduce it on screen. The film can't possibly engage me politically or emotionally as art if I'm spending the entire run time thinking about whether I get paid this Friday and what I'm going to cook for dinner.

The question is, is Akerman aware of the human proclivity toward idle thought during mundane tasks? Because this film is only oppressive and uncomfortable if it's empty, if this woman doesn't dream then this numbing boredom could have something to say. But that doesn't work: we all think all the time, we all daydream. Does Jeanne Dielman of 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles daydream? Presumably so, but the film is so damned externalized that I have no idea what she's thinking. And without her thoughts to guide me through these three and a half irretrievable hours of my one wild and precious life, I'm left with my own.

As such, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles's conclusion is spectacularly unmotivated and completely unearned. The finale is entirely unsupported by its previous action because this was, for me, a film about what type of sandwich I'll eat when I get home and what's going on this weekend. -TK 10/7/10

Art house at its most annoying. This could be a novel idea, but at 200 minutes it becomes an endurance more than cinematic nourishment. Despite topping the recent Sight and Sound list, I am puzzled by its sudden jump to the #1 spot overlapping several films, Jeanne Dielman has nothing educational about it. You don't even learn that much about Jeanne herself. This will teach you nothing about cinema as an art form besides your personal tolerance for boredom. For me, and I imagine the majority of watchers, that was at the end of the first day.

It's tough to express my feelings without feeling like an anti-snob, because I do think the opinion of critics is losing harmony with the moviegoing public and that is an indictment, people who've dedicated their lives to films being disregarded because they didn't like the corpo nostalgia slunk like Mario or FNAF, is more annoying than people who swear by Rotten Tomatoes like it's the bible. I think what experts in the film world see to be the paramount examples of the medium is an important voice and should be maintained. But I'm not a zombie, I have a mind on its wavelength and I know my synapses well enough by this point to know when something isn't clicking. There was no point during this watchalong that all the pieces fit together, no eureka moment, because once you pick up on the rudimentary structure, you've caught onto Ackerman's gambit, even as quickly as ten minutes. You know what the point is, and even if that means the ultimate climax is still a swerve narratively, there had to be more compelling or at least cinematically-inspired methods to get there. If this has to be 200 minutes then fine - but does the camera have to be perfectly static all the time? Does every line reading from the characters have to sound like they've been awake sixty hours and have strepsils stuck in their throat? I do admire in parts how committed this whole project was to opposing convention, being so anti-movie that even when you get your lickety-split 70s nude shot, it means nothing because it's just as plain and realist as everything else. Boring films exist in abundance, and it's no crime if you make one incidentally and audience members can't feel too duped if it seems like the filmmakers accidentally made a cure to insomnia. But when you're as driven as Jeanne Dielman is in being dull, purpose be damned, it's hard to come with a pragmatic attitude besides that the film hates you. If I paid money or had traveled outside my bedroom comfort to see this, I may have just hated it back.