Chantal Akerman's Les Renzvous d'Anna (1978) is an austere and astringent film made for Art House release, that is, designed to be seen by a minority of a minority -- feminist-inclined art movie buffs. The picture is self-consciously joyless, a paean to a certain sort of perverse loneliness. It's watchable and, even, compelling in its picturesque hopelessness. But, like many films about profound anomie, it's essentially pointless -- if anything had meaning, then, the film's dogmatic misery would be fraudulent. Akerman is a skillful director and she devises camera placements that complement her narrative -- long tracking shots across train stations, empty street scenes, and many images of people staring out windows onto gloomy-looking cityscapes. There's no music -- the soundtrack buzzes with ambient traffic noise or street sounds; at times, the film has a kind supernal hum that reminds me of the seething, buzzing sounds in David Lynch movies. The picture most resembles some of Wim Wenders' early films -- it is, indeed, a kind of a road movie, although one so severely depressed that the freedom and energy in the genre has been completely repressed.
Anna is a film maker touring art houses with her new movie. She travels alone and spends her nights in cheerless hotel rooms. Anna is beautiful -- she's played by the pale and graceful Aurore Clement -- and she has no trouble picking up men. In fact, despite the film's patina of misery, Anna has two sexual encounters in a period of what seems to me to be three days. In a German city, we see her in bed with a very handsome guy who turns out to be a school teacher -- the actor looks a bit like Rutger Hauer. In the middle of their encounter, she tells him to stop and, disappointed, the school teacher goes home. However, the next day at noon, he picks her up and takes her to his daughter's birthday party. Akerman has the habit of cutting away from anything that might involve interactions between several people -- so we never see Anna discussing her films at theaters and, of course, the party (involving a half-dozen or so participants) is also off-limits. Anna's would- be beaux delivers a long monologue about his mother's house and the War and his divorce: it's self-pitying and not particularly interesting. (This monologue is the first of several in the film, all of them exercises in morose self-pity and none really effective or compelling.) Anna has been trying to call someone in Italy but can't get through -- the "lines are all overloaded", she keeps getting told by the attendants at various long-distance phone salons that she uses. She is going home to Paris via Brussels and Cologne. (Anna is a surrogate for Akerman and we learn that she is Belgian and lived as a girl in Brussels -- she's been in Paris for eight years practicing her profession as film maker: this means that she is 28 at the time of the narrative.) In Cologne, she stops to meet a friend named Ida. Ida is an older woman, possibly Jewish, apparently from Poland. Ida's son was engaged to Anna but, of course, she has dumped him. Ida delivers a monologue about marriage and says "...to be alone is no life, especially for a girl -- it will end badly." Ida talks about her husband and how she once loved him -- now, he's old and grumpy, but she puts up with him on the basis of earlier happy memories. This ringing endorsement of marriage isn't too compelling as far as Anna is concerned. It's the middle of the night. Anna gets back on the train and travels to Brussels -- now it must be about three in the morning. She meets her mother in the empty train station after standing next to a German who delivers another long monologue -- they are both smoking, something allowed in the train's corridors, and gazing out the window at the darkened train stations and empty cities through which they are passing. The German talks about freedom and wanting to meet that special someone --he's probably trying to pick her up, but Anna is so listless and he's so ambiguous in his discourse that the encounter goes nowhere. In Brussels, Anna talks to her mother and they rent a room so they can sleep for a few hours. Anna's mother complains about her husband. Anna gets naked and hops into bed with mom, something that seems strange at least to an American audience, and there they snuggle while Anna talks about a love affair with a beautiful and generous Italian girl -- "better not tell your father," her mother morosely observes. It turns out that the Italian girl is the person Anna has been trying to reach by telephone. Anna, then, gets back on the train and rides to Paris, seemingly arriving late at night. A former lover, Daniel, picks her up and they go to yet another comfortless hotel, even though they both are at home and live alone. Daniel is apparently sick. He indulges himself in a monologue and Anna takes off her clothes to lie naked on top of him. She feels that he is feverish and so she takes a cab for miles and miles through picturesque Paris to buy him some pills. She returns and gives him the medications. Then, she goes home to her anonymous apartment, lays down and listens to the phone messages on her answering machine. The last one is a woman's voice saying "Where are you, Anna?" in English. Presumably, this is the Italian girlfriend. But Anna doesn't call her or really do much of anything since the film is now about to fade to black. Her agent on the answering machine has told her that she will have to tour with her movie in Vienna and Geneva and some other city in the Alps.
The film's characters are all rootless, cosmopolitan, and damaged. The shadow of World War Two hangs over some of the characters who seem battered by their memories of the conflict. At times, Akerman's mise-en-scene seems designed to enact sheer pointlessness -- for instance, she and Ida walk to a railroad cafe, the entire stroll documented by lengthy tracking shots through the mostly empty station; when they reach the cafe, a modernist white patio with empty tables ranged about the room, Anna is no longer hungry. So they turn around and the camera tracks them persistently all the way back to the railroad platform where they met in the first place. (I know why Akerman avoids the cafe -- later, she stages a long scene in a cafe in Brussels with Anna's mother: this is an elaborate old school European cafe with marble-veneer walls and huge mirrors. The feeling that I have is that Akerman, for some reason, didn't want two cafe scenes -- although, she doesn't seem to have any problem with repetitive street and train station scenes.) In some instances, Akerman's staging is frivolous to the point of absurdity: in a confrontation with the school teacher, Anna listens to him monologue in a hotel lobby with the night clerk directly between them as the fulcrum of the carefully balanced and symmetrical shot (she loves symmetry). The discussion is intimate and the viewer is left questioning why the two are unburdening themselves in front an attentive, if impassive, hotel clerk. Aurore Clement is good and looks fantastic naked. But the whole thing is just an excuse for staging lots of Edward Hopper-style Night Hawks images -- empty windows and streets, lonely industrial wastelands, interminable tracking shots of train stations that all look alike. Years ago, I saw Akerman's installation about Russia called, I think, D'Est -- this was at the Walker Art Center around 1991 and featured big screens with twenty and thirty-minute tracking shots along Moscow streets during a snow storm: people were patiently waiting for buses or street cars in the bitter cold. There was no narrative but I thought the installation was fascinating and still think about it sometimes now 30 years later. Anna's encounters, I think, would be better without the connective tissue of its meandering narrative: just give me the precise camera-movements, the lens gliding through endless barren subways and train stations. That would be enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment