Meetings with Anna

"Les Rendez-vous d'Anna" is the only film of Chantal Akerman's which I've seen. It is seemingly a highly personal film about a few days in the life of a female Belgian filmmaker who is traveling around Europe showing her latest work. There are long shots of traveling, whether by train, car or taxi, during which...well,nothing really happens. Kind of like real life. The Europe which is observed all looks the same, pretty much - sterile and dispiriting, rather like the Anna's life. Hardly a tree is seen in the whole movie and Anna actually tells her German lover that she doesn't much care for flowers - nature seems to have been blotted out. She has encounters on her travels with a sensitive, handsome German whom she rejects, a long-time friend of her mother's who wants Anna to settle down and marry her son, a German man who has travelled the world and is now decided on living in France which he declares the land of freedom, her mother in Brussels and her Parisian lover. Through all the encounters, Anna remains detached and pretty much a blank slate. She doesn't really seem to know what she is looking for, but it doesn't seem to be commitment of any kind. Clement is purposefully reserved and detached in the lead role, but the people she meets offer opportunities for several sharp well-turned performances, namely from Magali Noel, Lea Massari and Hans Zischler who is great as the rootless traveler searching for "freedom". "Anna" is an interesting, moody film but definitely not for those looking for action or entertainment. If that is your thing, avoid this film like the plague - but if you are a patient viewer who likes to be immersed in a mood and read between the lines, so to speak, this film may appeal to you.

Was a time when topics like bisexuality, biological clocks, loneliness, female identity, or diversity in filmmaking were cutting-edge stuff. Clearly that was a long time ago, and when you ignore those worn-out taboos and take a really hard look at this movie it's just a really boring travelogue. Call it Lenny Bruce syndrome. I guess you had to be there to get it.

The film hinges on a single character, and I didn't find her remotely interesting. We don't know much about her other than she is lonely. We don't know about her politics, her art, her opinions on anything, her flaws, her appeal...there's nothing to the character. She's a bland ice queen that attracts a multitude of people without trying, a super competent character who doesn't face any struggle, a supposedly internationally famous artist who doesn't seem very good at communicating with other people or has anything insightful to say. Why should I care about this person?

Unfortunately this film suffers from the lingering influence of Antonioni and others from sixties art-house cinema where the camera lingers ten minutes on literally nothing, because evidently five minutes of nothing was insufficient to build the mood of ennui. The same exact mood that the other 150 minutes creates in the same way.

My first impression on The Meetings of Anna was that Lost in Translation directed by a gloomy Wes Anderson. This is my first Akerman, so I didn't know what to expect from this. The more I think about it it feels like this is the kind of film that grows on you as time passes. The loneliness of Anna all the while everyone she meets is opening up to her although she always seeming distant was quite relatable. There are so many choices that life offers you, but you are confused and miserable so that you reject all that and yearns for something you don't know yet or something you are denying. I saw it a couple of days ago but it has a deeper impression on me now since it has been in my head for these days.

I try to not watch the news if I can help it; it plays out like a bad movie, and what bad movies do is they narrow the view. I want to be able to see how things move and how they come to be a certain way in their tide, not their surf. When I do watch the news, like the other week with what happened at Brussels, I'm dismayed at what a frightful place the world can be when gripped by senseless violence and anxious views.

But then unexpectedly the same night I discover a film like this that restores everything back to its original dimensions, the world becomes vast and empty again. Watching it I am reminded that sweet, alert souls are out there who quietly live and create, make sense they give back to us that negates ignorance and need, affirms the simplicity of just being.

It's not in any thing it says one way or another, it has no words of wisdom. It's in how we pass through things, how we observe the passing. It's a process of emptying out so that what remains, hopefully, is the larger, sentient view that regards itself in all these things.

A woman is taking the night train home, it's as simple as this, one of those films where 'nothing happens'. She's a director who was in Berlin to show her movie, a surrogate for Akerman herself. The whole has the intimate tone of moments that were lived through and committed to memory.

The story, what little of it there is, is only here as a way of gathering observations. It's so we can make a few stops on the way home. A man in Berlin whose wife left him and is unsure about what's next, eager to cling to her. Elsewhere she meets an acquaintance from back home who urges her to get married, that she's not getting any younger. The train pulls up at Brussels, she's reunited with her mother for one night and then she's off again.

Eventually there's a lover waiting to pick her up in Paris but even the night they share in a nondescript room offers no haven; he has to be up in a few hours to go to work, she will leave again, transient arrangements for the night. In a marvelous instance she lays naked on top of him but he begins to hurt and she has to go out in a taxi in search of a drugstore.

So 'nothing happens'; I say everything does. You could shape each encounter into its own film with its own drama, here it is all distilled to a few exchanges. The woman listens without judgment or advice, they say what's on their mind, then they part again, anxieties dispersing. She's not unaffected herself, we note, but she moves without need.

It's all simple here, simple in the Japanese Buddhist sense that recognizes the transience of things without suffering, the suffering without attachment, emptiness where not a single thing is redundant or missing. A different thing from just modern lack. Buddhism isn't about renouncing reality as often misconstrued, it's about renouncing ego and craving so that you are free to return; not about resting above suffering but resting in the middle of it.

It's all here. No elephant art for this woman, no grandiose meaning, and yet it's all here in the sketches of the transient world, the meaning all in how we see with an eye that is coming back to the beginning.

Something to meditate upon.

At the end of the 'French new wave' era, it seemed European directors were looking to make films more based on emotion and human interaction. This film is really a collection of stories that the viewer pieces together to understand the full story of the main character, Anna. What is wonderful is how the stories or 'meetings' are so contrasting in terms of emotion, yet all seem so natural and all are very relevant in order for us to understand just who Anna is. No doubt it is a film that requires patience, but that seems to be the very point, like Anna the viewer must be patient. It may be speckled with scenes of joy and nostalgia, but for the most part it is an alienating tale showing all to well that with success comes a price of some sort.