Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

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.

Fascinating, powerful, hyper-controlled, super-subtle study of woman slowly coming unglued. Uses its 3 hour+ running time to put you inside the stultifying boredom and ennui of her life, and lets you see the tiny changes in her repetitive days that are powerful and meaningful barometers of the titanic emotions going on behind her blank masque. Not easy or 'fun' to watch. By definition (and intention?) it gets slow to the point of boredom at times. (Indeed NY Times critic Vincent Canby, who loved the film, jokingly warned that watching it 'could be fatal' if one was in the wrong mood.) But everything interconnects in an amazingly thought-out way. Every bit of dialogue (of which there's almost none) leaves a clue, or at least a trace. Fascinating camera-work; almost always static images. with every cut at 90 degree angles. And again, when that rule is broken there are specific thematic and storytelling reasons. A challenging, 'difficult' film, but one not to be missed.

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 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).