![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Je Tu Il Elle
Jun. 22nd, 2023 10:06 amThe director Chantal Akerman once said, “When people are enjoying a film they say “I didn’t see the time go by”... but I think that when time flies and you don’t see time passing by you are robbed of an hour or two hours of your life… With my films you’re aware of every second passing through your body.”
Earlier this week at the Kan-Kan, I saw Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle, and Akerman would be pleased to hear that you do indeed feel every. single. second. of the 80-minute film as it crawls past.
This is less boring than it sounds. It becomes meditative to watch our protagonist as she loafs around in her white room, having removed all the furniture except the mattress. Then she writes a letter, and then she writes another letter, and meanwhile she eats sugar directly out of a paper bag with a spoon, and then she writes… well maybe it’s also a letter, but she ends up laying it over the floor like a script or a novel… and then she takes off her clothes and lies on the mattress naked, with her clothes draped over her, as the snow falls outside her windows, and by “windows” I mean an entire wall of French doors, without curtains, which open directly onto a sidewalk.
Then she leaves the room! (She gets dressed first.) She hitchhikes with a truck driver, and gives him a handjob, and in return he tells her more about his sex life than anyone ever wanted to know (his eleven-year-old daughter turns him on, apparently), but at last she reaches her destination, which is the apartment of… an ex-girlfriend?... and they have sex. The sex scene is as interminably long as the writing/eating sugar/stripping naked scene earlier. The next morning, protag leaves as girlfriend sleeps. THE END.
Purposefully forcing your audience to experience every second of your film is a bold aesthetic choice, and certainly some of the images have lingered in my mind. But the aesthetic is definitely more thought-provoking than enjoyable, which I’m sure Akerman would say is the point.
Earlier this week at the Kan-Kan, I saw Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle, and Akerman would be pleased to hear that you do indeed feel every. single. second. of the 80-minute film as it crawls past.
This is less boring than it sounds. It becomes meditative to watch our protagonist as she loafs around in her white room, having removed all the furniture except the mattress. Then she writes a letter, and then she writes another letter, and meanwhile she eats sugar directly out of a paper bag with a spoon, and then she writes… well maybe it’s also a letter, but she ends up laying it over the floor like a script or a novel… and then she takes off her clothes and lies on the mattress naked, with her clothes draped over her, as the snow falls outside her windows, and by “windows” I mean an entire wall of French doors, without curtains, which open directly onto a sidewalk.
Then she leaves the room! (She gets dressed first.) She hitchhikes with a truck driver, and gives him a handjob, and in return he tells her more about his sex life than anyone ever wanted to know (his eleven-year-old daughter turns him on, apparently), but at last she reaches her destination, which is the apartment of… an ex-girlfriend?... and they have sex. The sex scene is as interminably long as the writing/eating sugar/stripping naked scene earlier. The next morning, protag leaves as girlfriend sleeps. THE END.
Purposefully forcing your audience to experience every second of your film is a bold aesthetic choice, and certainly some of the images have lingered in my mind. But the aesthetic is definitely more thought-provoking than enjoyable, which I’m sure Akerman would say is the point.
