Je Tu Il Elle

[osprey_archer]

The 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.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Interesting choices! I've seen something similar in a museum as, like, filmed performance art (?) but it wasn't a full 80 minutes.

Out of curiosity, do you get to see the letter as she's writing it, or just the act of writing a letter?

[osprey_archer]

Slightly terrified to try Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, because it shares this aesthetic, but for more than three hours. I'm just not sure I want to watch someone peel potatoes for that long...

We have no idea what's in the letter! Even when she lays it out on the floor, we never get close enough to read it.

[sanguinity]

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.

Obviously Akerman and I have differing opinions of this, but when I'm aware of every passing second, I'm often thinking to myself, These are two hours of my life that I will never get back.

Not always! Sometimes I'm saving up that experience of the moment for the future! But it doesn't sound like this film will be one of those experiences...

[osprey_archer]

RIGHT. I feel that is in fact how MOST of us feel about the excruciating awareness of every passing second. It's that "the last five minutes before the end of the school day take approximately five years" feeling!

[asakiyume]

which I'm sure Akerman would say is the point ... fair enough, I guess ....

If someone is going to demand my fixed attention for 80 minutes, I want them to have something to say worth stopping strangers in the street and having them listen. This, by contrast, reminds me of a little kid pulling at her parent's sleeve saying, "Mom! Mom! Mommy! Mom! Mom, listen!" And then when the mom does say, "Yes?" the kid actually doesn't have anything to share. She just wanted her mother's attention. Which is fine! Kids want their parents attention. But that's a kid and a parent. If a stranger is going to pull at my sleeve like that, I want more than letters, whiteness, sugar, handjob, sex, the end.

[osprey_archer]

I do feel that Akerman is trying to say something - about the interest and dignity of everyday lives (women's lives) - but I'm not at all sure that a method most of the audience will find dull and incomprehensible is the best way to say it. And is making something into art the only way to recognize its value, anyway?

[asakiyume]

Yeah, re: audience reaction, if you're going to vaguely bore (or straight-out bore) your audience, maybe that's precisely *not* how you want to highlight the value and dignity of everyday women's lives. ... Plus, there's something about having the particular stand in for the general? Can't quite decide what I'm feeling here, but maybe it's that every particular life is particular and idiosyncratic, and on the one hand that's precisely where the interest **is**, but also, it makes it hard to be a universal? Am I just repeating an incredibly obvious thing? What I'm really thinking is that the hitchhiking and the handjob aren't very generalizable AT ALL. And for that matter, writing letters all day seems... IDK, not routine at all? Like most people operate with the strictures of some sort of societal role ("Daughter" or "Student" or "Farm Hand" or "Office Laborer" or whatever) but not her, apparently?

[osprey_archer]

Yes, there's a bit of an inherent contradiction in trying to show that women's lives are interesting by making a film that most people will find boring. The method undermines the message!