Les Rendez-vous d'Anna

It's like someone dared Akerman to make the most boring movie ever. She failed, but it's not for lack of trying. Ostensibly the story of a filmmaker struggling with her sexuality and her more or less transient lifestyle, Akerman unwisely uses a complete cipher as her protagonist, who spends most of the movie interacting with men who are (if possible) even more dull than she is. Because feminism...?

Chantal Akerman pertaining the role of mature Meredith Grey who decided to get into the avant grade film industry. She is very inexperience, so all the other characters must constantly explain and demonstrate via the use of didactic monologues how you really do it big time.

This felt like what would happen if someone took an average stage play and made it into the most mundane energyless way possible. The acting isn't bad, just stilted and unnatural.

The heart of the film lies with Aurore Clément as the title character, who seems hopelessly stuck between loneliness and a search for human connection. Much like I had hoped, the film looks amazing, with great framing, clever compositions and absolutely gorgeous colours (holy Eastmancolor, Batman!). It falls somewhat apart in the final act but it's still interesting enough to give a few more films from Akerman a chance. Definitely a fascinating voice.

Akerman was born twenty years before me and lived on the other side of the world, but I can feel some connection with the world she presents, and the protagonist reminds me of women I’ve known, searching for something or someone but also detached from others and seemingly on a long, slow path to permanent solitude and isolation. In Akerman’s case, one does get the distinct feeling that the struggle between dependence and independence really was centrally if not exclusively focused on her mother.

If your idea of a good time is to watch badly-lit characters tell you the movie in stilted delivery, this might just become your new favorite movie. (But there is something about the transience that sticks with me.)

Anna lives a transient life, occupying liminal spaces like train corridors and hotel rooms in between her alienated encounters. It is impossible to ignore the autobiographical elements in this character, and if indeed this is a confessional (appropriate then as the most talkative film of this period in Akerman's work), it is a sinking feeling to know that its creator would eventually commit suicide.

Introspective Akerman tells about a Belgian filmmaker on the road. From a German hotel room, through Brussels, to her Paris home, her trip is a patchwork of increasingly inward one-on-one encounters, beginning with a strange man and ending with her life partner, and finally alone checking her answering machine. Affects runs the gamut from bored detachment to stifling intimacy (like in a marvelous scene with the great Lea Massari as her mother). Seminal, and reminiscent only of Dreyer's Gertrude.

The follow-up to Jeanne Dielman is less enigmatic but more emotionally resonant. Clement's performance is not as rich and subtle as Seyrig's, but it doesn't need to be. Akerman tells much of Anna's story through her mise-en-scene, as she is often seen behind some sort of barrier to the outside world. She's a person torn between a desire to make human connections and a self-defeating inability to do so. The pacing can sometimes try your patience, but it's quite within the limits of tolerability.