Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: The Best-Written, Most Boring Movie Ever Made

A story can be simultaneously incredible and tedious.

Meatloaf is inherently boring.

I am an old, old man, but I’m still often surprised by the depth and persistence of my ignorance¹. It’s absolutely incredible to me that stuff that has existed for decades or centuries completely escapes my notice². I guess it happens to all of us—we reach a point when we think we know things, and then we inevitably reach another point when we realize that we don’t, not really³.

So, this leads me to Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film I didn’t even know existed until very recently. In the early days of the Internet there was a cowboyish sense of adventure whenever you searched for something, because you never knew what kind of weird personal website or piece of incredible trivia (or horrifying porn) you were about to stumble onto⁴. These days most of your search results and destinations will be corporate-managed and skillfully designed⁵, but there’s still the occasional moment of discovery (mainly due to the sheer volume of stuff I know nothing about, which is enormous and thus guarantees at least some serendipity until I die). So a random Internet interaction led me to Jeanne Dielman, which is simultaneously an example of terrific writing (and performances) and possibly the most boring movie I have ever watched, all three hours and twenty minutes of it—in goddamn French⁶.

And All the Days Like It

To the credit of Jan Decorte, you really want to slap Sylvain about 5 minutes after he shows up.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is about the titular Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), a middle-aged single mother and widow living in a 4-room apartment in Brussels with her teenage son Sylvain (Jan Decorte)—though the age of the kid is kind of vaguely presented in the film, and Decorte was 25 when the film was made⁷. Jeanne’s husband died six years earlier, and to make ends meet Jeanne lives a financially careful life of quiet desperation: She turns off lights as she exits rooms, conserves ingredients from her carefully planned meals, and prostitutes herself⁸.

The film is pretty famous for its commitment to showing Jeanne’s dull, repetitive routine. We get to see her perform her housewifery in real time—when Jeanne cooks potatoes, we watch her cooking potatoes for minutes at a time. We follow Jeanne as she moves through her day and we get to see it all—or most of it, as the film does have cuts and does skip over time here and there, most notably when Jeanne goes to sleep and when she’s servicing the first two of the three clients she has over.

The first day of the story is therefore simultaneously mesmerizing and tedious. Jeanne has clearly winnowed her existence down to a regimented routine that has had all the fat trimmed off—there isn’t a wasted moment, movement, or a spare minute. She’s so meticulous, in fact, that she times her cooking to coincide with her client meetings in her bedroom. Watching her move through her tiny home (and out on the street while doing her shopping and indulging in a coffee at a local shop, her one apparent moment of comfort during her days) is both the most boring stuff you’ve ever watched and possibly the most compelling⁹.

As I watched Jeanne take a bath, scrub out her tub, greet her son when he returns from school, serve and eat dinner, then clean up, spend a few minutes knitting a sweater while listening to music, then pull out the sofa bed for the kid and go to sleep, I thought about my own routines. I am a man who loves a routine, folks. My own daily life is filled with rituals that are performed more or less at the same time every day. This movie made me feel seen, is what I’m saying, and Jeanne’s largely silent movements through the empty, quiet spaces of her life remind you that most of the shit we do every day is just drudgery necessary for survival¹⁰. I’m sure I don’t look any more engaged than Jeanne when I’m doing the dishes.

Once the film has taught us Jeanne’s routine, the first day ends and the second begins. We see a bit more of her routine from the morning side, and then things begin to subtly go wrong. It’s not obvious, and nothing is dramatic. Little aspects of Jeanne’s regimented existence simply go wrong: A dropped brush, overcooked potatoes, messy hair¹¹. It’s surprisingly disturbing to watch, because the director (Chantal Akerman) has done such an amazing job teaching us Jeanne’s routine. Watching it unspool gets under your skin. And it leads to a fairly shocking and surprising ending.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. The film is three hours plus of a woman in 1975 Brussels preparing dinners, drinking coffee, and cleaning her house (and then ten minutes of something else). It’s kind of boring, though your mileage may vary¹². But it’s also an example of absolutely terrific writing.

There's No Point Talking About These Things

One suspects Delphine Seyrig had to train to be able to master all the sitting and staring she does in this movie.

When people ask you about showing and telling, especially in relation to characters, you can refer to this movie. This movies is all showing. It’s fucking incredible how Akerman shows us so much about this character almost completely without words. That’s also due to Seyrig’s performance, which is subdued to an almost absurd degree—but her nearly-silent presence and rote activities means that even the slightest tic is explosively disruptive. In the end, between the choices these two artists make in this film, you wind up understanding everything about Jeanne as a character even though she has perhaps five minutes of dialog in a three hour and twenty minute film.

Many people look at Jeanne Dielman through a lens of feminism and a critique of the patriarchal structure of society, and they’re not wrong. They’re correct that Jeanne spends all her time and energy serving men—her son, her clients—and this servitude has crushed any other hopes or dreams out of her life. And initially watching Jeanne go through the endless chores of her day seems like nothing more than stressing this point—Seyrig once said of the film “It has turned out to be quite unbearable to watch. Nobody has really had to watch three and a half hours of housewifing before.¹³”

But the intense scrutiny of Jeanne’s routine is also in the service of building out the character for us. Jeanne’s routine isn’t just a thrifty woman working efficiently to feed her son and keep house. She’s clearly compulsive. You see this not just in the tight routine she follows, but in the little ways she arranges things very precisely, the way she endlessly clicks lights on and off as she moves through her tiny home. You see it in the way she doesn’t seem to actually enjoy anything, even her afternoon coffee—she enters the shop, she sits, she drinks her coffee very quickly, she leaves. There’s no lingering, no relaxing. No enjoying.

You also see it in the way she treats spare moments. Even in a routine as tight as Jeanne’s there are the occasional minutes when there’s nothing to do—the potatoes are on boil, your client isn’t due for five minutes, and you’ve cleaned everything. Jeanne has no clue what to do in these moments. She invents chores, she sits and stares into space. You know Jeanne isn’t mentally healthy long before she begins to overtly unravel.

And that unraveling is glorious. Day two begins as just another in a long line of days, but when she meets her client for a nooner, something happens. We don’t know what it is. Whereas on Day One she emerged from her bedroom as pin-perfect as she entered it, cooly accepting cash from her customer, on Day Two she emerges slightly rumpled, her hair out of place, her affect just slightly off. What follows is a triumph of subtle filmmaking: Jeanne is just off, but we only see it in little ways. She fucks up dinner. She drops things. She never fixes her hair. You might not think someone dropping a shoeshine brush would be a dramatic moment, but it fucking is thanks to the work that Akerman and Seyrig have put in.

The writing, in other words, is stupendous. Every detail of the story is terrific and serves to build this character. The apartment is tiny and filled with old, worn things—but it’s also spotless. Jeanne clearly has no money, so she treats everything she possesses with a Depression-era reverence—when she loses a button on a jacket, she spends hours trying to track down a match, even rejecting the suggestion that she simply replace all the buttons because it would be a bit too much money¹⁴. The long, infinite takes watching Jeanne wash dishes or cook or air out the apartment by opening windows encourages our eye to wander and study the way she’s set up her tiny kitchen for maximum efficiency, or the sad little figurines she has on display in her small sitting room, or the mis-matched tiles in her bathroom where a repair has clearly been made. It allows us to notice the grungy towel she drapes over her bed to protect her coverlet from her afternoon sex work, the housecoat she dons to protect herself from splatter while cooking, the one outdoor coat she owns.

It also allows us to notice her little physical reactions. On Day One, her slight smile when her son returns from school as she’s preparing dinner tells you that she’s devoted to him even if their interactions are restrained. When her sex work clients arrive, she engages in a pantomime of hosting, taking their coats and greeting them in order to keep up a superficial sense of normalcy and control. Whenever something jolts her routine, Jeanne is nonplussed. Her hands flutter, she hesitates. When she walks into her coffee shop on Day Three and finds her usual spot taken, her usual waitress not working, she is fidgety and stiff, and leaves almost immediately.

When the climax comes, it’s shocking, but not surprising. After three hours and three days with Jeanne, we know this woman, and we understand why she does what she does. Simply put, that’s good writing.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is not an exciting film. Watching Jeanne do housework is boring as hell. Your mind and eye will wander. But the writing here is excellent—and that’s the thing. Writing is a tool. You use words to communicate ideas, story, character. Writing can be incredibly good and the story can still be boring—and yet, somehow, still worth experiencing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sit somewhere and stare off into the middle distance, waiting for something to happen to me.

Next week: Bullet Train and the case of the disappearing world.

1. For example, I just discovered that boxes of aluminum foil have tabs on each side to hold the roll in place when you pull on the sheet so the whole things doesn’t pop out, and I am now wallowing in my ignorant shame.

2. Also, disturbing, as it confirms that the universe pre-existed me and will likely continue to exist after I’m gone unless I figure out how to end it on my way out. If I gotta die, I’m taking each and every one of you with me.

3. My House Words are “I drink and I don’t know anything.”

4. Mostly horrifying porn. The first erotic fake celebrity image I ever encountered involved Bea Arthur. Worse than seeing it is knowing someone created it.

5. The way you can search for something like “interesting hats” and five seconds later your Facebook feed is full of advertisements for mitres is simultaneously terrible and wonderful. Yes, I bought a mitre. Who wouldn’t?

6. I am still haunted by the time I went to Paris and attempted to speak the pidgin French I’d managed to teach myself and my reward was a succession of pitying looks followed by suggestions that we “just speak English, okay?” Is the new title of my memoir A SUCCESSION OF PITYING LOOKS? Maybe.

7. Though my understanding is that Belgian kids in the 1970s were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes by age 12, so who knows.

8. As one does.

9. Oddly, this line appeared verbatim in The Duchess’s marriage vows, describing me.

10. At least that’s what I tell myself when I start drinking whiskey at 3PM every day: Necessary for my survival. I even have a note from my doctor.

11. This is compelling because the experience of a day going off the rails is universal: We’ve all had those days where one small misstep seems to snowball into disaster one tiny increment at a time. Why, just the other day I forgot to brush my teeth in the morning and long story short now I am writing this from a Peruvian jail.

12. Another potential memoir title: KIND OF BORING THOUGH YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. You’d buy it.

13. See, if you were to come across three hours of footage showing me as sang and danced while vacuuming my house, you would be riveted. But not everyone has what I have: Molten Charisma.

14. I would have solved the problem by putting the coat in the trash and claiming I was robbed. That tactic worked a charm when I was 12, and still works to this day, though The Duchess is starting to worry about how often I am mugged when given chores.