Monday, August 29, 2011
ENNUI OR WHAT?
Today's film was Chantal Akerman's early experimental film
This is the kind of film that you go an art theater to see. The house is slim. Maybe thirty people. The lights go down. The film is shown. The lights go up and there are only you and one or two people still sitting in the place.
Structured in three parts, the first is Ackerman in a small room with a mattress and some other furniture which eventually gets pushed out in the hall. The mattress stays. Ackerman sits, sleeps, moves the mattress around, eats from a bag of sugar (disgusting) and generally flakes out. She gets naked. Stop!
In the second part she goes on a hitchhike with a trucker (the young Niels Arestrup who is the reason I got this disc as I much admire his work) in which she jerks him off as he gives instructions and then as pillow talk discusses the history of sex with his wife.
Third and last, Ackerman goes to see an ex-girl friend and seduces her. Not a difficult job as the ex is either on something or deeply depressed.
There is the longest lesbian love scene that I may have sat through in my entire life.
To say that this film of nothing leading to nothing is creepy is an understatement. The action that there is, subject to long periods of silence or held positions (except the masturbation, a lot of movement in that "faster faster now slow") is quite disturbing because of this pacing. I am sure that it is intentional and it works.
One becomes grateful for any action and then is rewarded with shit like the sugar, the jerk off and the long, long lesbian scene.
There is no reason to try to interpret this. It is experimental film at its best, actually. I stayed to the end. I really, really dozed off once.
There is feeling here and weirdness and that is nice. Everything is spare. Minimal.
Ackerman went on to make a lot of films. Not one of which I am compelled to see.
Nor this one. Ever again.
I will give it a 2 out of Netflix5 because it is manipulative and, in some ways, quite cruel. Mostly to the audience. Fuck you Chantel. And thanks.
The poorer movies always get the longest review.
Labels: films
