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The narrator -- Chantal Akerman, the director of this movie -- reads seventeen letters from her mother. Meanwhile, the audience gets to see shots of a Manhattan where people don't look at the camera, unless they are on the subway or teenaged girls.

It's a far piece from the world of Kenyon & Mitchell, but Akerman is not filming events where the attendees might hope to see themselves in a theater. I watched this movie and tried to figure out where each shot was taken. I think I was pretty successful. That game, however, did not take up the whole of the 85 minutes of the movie, and what was someone who was not an adult in Manhattan in the 1970s supposed to do? After ten or fifteen minutes, I decided that the audience was supposed to make of this a portrait of the recipient of the letter, an individual whose mother thinks she is hungry for news of the family, who never writes about whether she is happy or has made any friends (inference: she isn't and hasn't), and the shots are of her world in New York: first downtown near the River, then a long sojourn in the Times Square Subway Station and finally a ten-minute shot from the stern of the Staten Island Ferry setting out of Manhattan.

I think that with this movie, Akerman is trying to rewrite the relationship between film maker and audience. A film maker makes a film that tells a story, and the audience is the perceptive receiver of that tale, whether it is fiction or fact. We infer plot from the course of actions, from the changes in the personality, status, and relationships of the characters. We derive character from the way in which individual performers differ from the stereotyped roles. What, however, are we to make when you don't see the performer, don't hear her voice, except as a hurried reader of letters?

Well, the stereotypical responses fall neatly into two types. The first type says "Dagnabit! I came here to see a movie with interesting characters and a story! This is awful!" The second says "Ahah, this is new and interesting technique. I get what the auteur is trying to do, and approve, because that makes me a smarter, more percipient viewer." Which are you?

As for me, my reaction is "Interesting technique, but I'd prefer a little more effort from the film maker than forcing me to either fall asleep or make up my own story out of rags and tags." That's because I don't insist on a purely conventional story, but rather than being such an intelligent viewer that I get exactly what Akerman is trying to do, I'd like to have some character.

Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important and interesting female director of her era, yet she is sadly under-known here in the U.S. The range of her work is astounding, from largely experimental 'difficult' works like this, to frothy musical-comedy, to dark, thoughtful dramas, and just about everything in between. I'm so glad Criterion is finally putting out much of her early work.

As for this film, it's an interesting experiment, if far from Akerman's most important.

It's all images of New York City, mostly still at first, with ever more movement as it goes along. The soundtrack is all letters to Ackerman from her mother in France being read aloud over the images. Odd as it sounds, it easily held my attention, though never really got emotionally involving. Once again, Akerman's city images are great, evoking Edward Hopper's paintings. But both the images and overall impact seem less powerful to me than Akerman's somewhat similar - and to my taste far better -- 'Hotel Monterey'.

However with this kind of experimental film, everyone is likely to react differently, and I'd urge you to see it for yourself.

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman reads letters from her mother with her concerns about the twenty one year old in the big strange city. The visual is Chantal recording the everyday lives of regular people in the city which is almost a reply to her mother. It is experimental for its time and very fascinating. As a piece of nostalgia, it is fascinating to see 70's New York in an everyday setting. There is no character or plot or flashiness. It's simple street level observational filmmaking. Even as a travelogue, it's a little interesting.

This is about the fleeting world out there, the world that comes and goes and fills the senses with all ten directions.

On one hand is the massive city, New York before the makeover in all its brownstone squalor and sleepy routine. The whole film is a series of languid pans of the camera, they capture people waiting in subway stations, a black woman sitting outside on a chair, kids playing in a fire hydrant, street views and Bronx projects, coming and going. If like me, you're drawn to films that wander, you'll be exhilarated to see this.

On the other we have letters that Akerman's mother sent to her while she was in New York as a young girl, she reads these to us in quiet voice-over. She has such a soothing, calm voice. A mother who worries like all mothers do, who wants to know how she's doing, complains that she never writes back, tells about her health and how the store is doing and who got married to whom and that the heat is making her listless.

It's a quietly captivating thing, all in the contrast of exchange between a city that is cold and nameless, vast, and a glad voice from a faraway home that whispers news, love and worries. At one point the engine noise of cars in a four-lane boulevard drowns out a letter being read.

It swims from loneliness to familiarity, because it's all a part of it. And I'm reminded again of how I love seeing America through European eyes. I rank it up there with Varda's Documenteur (it's LA there) as views I'll carry with me, another Belgian, another spirit that wanders freely.

It ends with a long unbroken shot of Manhattan from a ferry vanishing in the distance with seagulls flying overhead. Forget about 'experimental' and 'minimalism', the shots being geometric or not; that's just the brush. A summer was lived.

Chantal Akerman was a young Belgian woman who had come to America to make movies. Unfortunately for her, she moved to New York City at a very low point in its history: the Summer of 1976. The Summer of Sam. The year of "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Graffiti everywhere. Burned out buildings. Garbage. Heat. Blackouts.

Chantal's camera records all this squalor in exquisite, non-judgmental long takes. You can almost smell the place. Somehow, the city arranges itself for her in fascinating compositions of color, personalities, and activities. What's that guy over there doing? What is that woman thinking about?

In counterpoint to the visuals, Chantal reads irritating letters from her beloved mother complaining that Chantel does not write frequently enough and When is she coming home? But how could she come home when there is such rich, baroque subject matter for her camera? We know that after her mother died several years later, Chantal committed suicide. The tension between her mother's letters and the power of the city is palpable.

Chantal has left us this gift of a precise record of a time and place that existed once and will not exist again. The final extremely long shot, taken evidently from the Staten Island ferry, is of Manhattan with its Twin Towers still present slowly receding and disappearing in the mist.