This film, a swan song in the most tragic and literal of senses, encapsulates much of what had characterized Chantal Akerman's career as a filmmaker. It's one of her most personal and least compromising films (and that's saying something!). In fact, it's so personal and uncompromising that if one watches it independently of the rest of her oeuvre it might seem a meaningless, tedious experience. For the established Akerman aficionado, however, it can be a powerful, if terribly sad, work of art.
Akerman might be said to belong to a tradition of super-self-reflexive Jewish artists such as Philip Roth, Woody Allen, and Clarice Lispector. Her protagonists are often vaguely disguised versions of herself. For her first feature she herself played the protagonist, a detached, sexually adventurous young woman. As with the works of the afore- mentioned artists, some will find many of her films too personal, as if they are only relevant to Akerman's own personal history and state of mind. For this reason, Jeanne Diehlmann, which clearly offers a more universal vision, or at least one pertinent to women in western society, is Akerman's most significant work.
Akerman's relationship with her Holocaust surviving mother has been an ongoing concern in her films, from Letters From Home through The Rendezvous of Anna and, in a less direct way, in Jeanne Diehlmann. This final film, completed shortly before Akerman's suicide, is the summation of that theme. Here we see Akerman's actual mother for the first time, having previously only been read her letters in Letters From Home some forty plus years earlier. We also see glimpses of Akerman herself in her sixties, unrecognizable from the ingenue she embodied in that first feature.
As the mother, at first a vivacious old woman, fades into poor health, the film becomes somewhat like a documentary version of Haneke's Amour, minus the degree of sadism always present in Haneke's work. The guiding emotion of these last scenes is a pain and loneliness that cannot express itself. I usually don't like it when people describe works of art as disguised suicide notes by their artists, but it seems unavoidable here. The film is tender and hopeless.
Akerman might be said to belong to a tradition of super-self-reflexive Jewish artists such as Philip Roth, Woody Allen, and Clarice Lispector. Her protagonists are often vaguely disguised versions of herself. For her first feature she herself played the protagonist, a detached, sexually adventurous young woman. As with the works of the afore- mentioned artists, some will find many of her films too personal, as if they are only relevant to Akerman's own personal history and state of mind. For this reason, Jeanne Diehlmann, which clearly offers a more universal vision, or at least one pertinent to women in western society, is Akerman's most significant work.
Akerman's relationship with her Holocaust surviving mother has been an ongoing concern in her films, from Letters From Home through The Rendezvous of Anna and, in a less direct way, in Jeanne Diehlmann. This final film, completed shortly before Akerman's suicide, is the summation of that theme. Here we see Akerman's actual mother for the first time, having previously only been read her letters in Letters From Home some forty plus years earlier. We also see glimpses of Akerman herself in her sixties, unrecognizable from the ingenue she embodied in that first feature.
As the mother, at first a vivacious old woman, fades into poor health, the film becomes somewhat like a documentary version of Haneke's Amour, minus the degree of sadism always present in Haneke's work. The guiding emotion of these last scenes is a pain and loneliness that cannot express itself. I usually don't like it when people describe works of art as disguised suicide notes by their artists, but it seems unavoidable here. The film is tender and hopeless.