Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

This movie is deliberately different, all in the service of telling us something we didn't know.

Movies are about movies. The borrow plot, character, lighting, sound editing and camera angles from what went before. Since "Birth of a Nation" introduced close-ups, cross cutting and cutaways in 1915 everyone has adopted that vocabulary for story telling. This movie throws all that out: The camera is fixed and stares at a scene for a very long time. Scenes had to be performed all the way through when they were filmed, because each was done in a single shot.

Movies use telescoping of time to compress the happenings of a long period into two hours. This movie tries to avoid that, depicting mundane tasks in their entirety. We watch Jeanne Dielman prepare a meatloaf, step by step, wash the dishes (her back is to us!), smooth the bed, or go shopping.

Movie use facial expressions to express feelings. Spoiler alert: When we get strong facial expressions from Jeanne Dielman there is a very good reason. And that only happens once in a three-hour, 21 minute film.

Movies use broad strokes to carry the audience along. Spiderman supplements explosions with 3D to keep me occupied. By contrast, this film uses subtle changes. You must watch closely to see what happens.

Most movies come to you. This movie requires you go to it. If there is dullness it is among those viewers who think that because they don't get something it's not there to get. There is plenty here but instead of being served to you it has to be harvested. And it is very fresh.

I watched this film forty years after it was made, in a theater in downtown New York City that plays only art films. Still, I was impressed by the audience's rapt attention over the 3 and 1/2 hours of the film. I too was sitting fascinated the entire time. We seemed to understand that a part of the experience of watching it was familiarizing ourselves with the details of the dignified Jeanne's existence. 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. Mostly you feel a great sadness for someone who is clearly desperate to make ends meet financially, so she and her child will be okay. 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.

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.

I can safely say that I have never seen cinema like this before! Set out over a three-day period, we see widowed mother, Jeanne Dielman, go through her daily routine, many tasks played out in real time, the camera stubbornly static, and often, moreso earlier in the film, at waist-height looking upwards, so that Jeanne's head and shoulders frequently disappear out of shot. At first, watching these actions performed in full seems a touch unnerving - this is something that many people have carried out hundreds of times, but we have never before been forced to pay attention to the monotony of daily chores in such detail. However, holding these shots for so long draws the viewer in even further, making them concentrate on every action, so that when even the smallest cracks appear in Jeanne's monotonous routine, it appears to be almost earth shattering, just as the effect this has on Jeanne is equally momentous.

The wonderful Delphine Seyrig here plays Jeanne with an astonishing subtlety and restraint, almost emotionless throughout the three hours and twenty minutes of running time, yet it remains one of the most affecting, powerful performances that I have seen in cinema.

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.