When I was a boy, international film critics picked Battleship Potemkin as the greatest movie ever made. This ranking was affirmed year after year in censuses tabulating critics' lists as to the ten best pictures ever made and reflected, of course, the hard left, even communist inclinations, typical of cineaste's in the forties, fifties, and, even, early sixties. Potemkin slipped into second place or lower when critical tastes changed -- for a decade or so, Citizen Kane was awarded the palm. Citizen Kane, a movie that, unlike Eisenstein's Potemkin, everyone had seen, then, yielded to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, also a Hollywood picture that everyone knows and admires. Then, suddenly, a few years ago (2022), the world's critics were polled again and concluded that the greatest film of all time was Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) -- I'm pretty sure that almost no one has seen Jeanne Dielman. The Sight and Sound anointing of Jeanne Dielman, of course, signifies what the Trump regime would style a DEI pick, "token" feminism some might say. But there's no doubt that Akerman is a formidable artist and her films, even if inaccessible on many different levels are a force to reckon with.
No Home Movie is Akerman's last picture. The film premiered at Locarno in the summer of 2015. It was widely derided and many people in the audience walked out of the screening. (In 2015, Akerman was well-known as a challenging feminist filmmaker, but had not yet been accorded the honor of having directed the greatest film of all time.) The movie was screened at the New York Film Festival on October 7, 2015 -- one day after Chantal Akerman's death was reported in the Paris Monde. It's impossible to watch the movie without Akerman's suicide casting a grim shadow over the picture. But the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy probably should be resisted -- Akerman was hospitalized for depression a few weeks before she killed herself and, of course, there's no evidence that she was seriously ill or suicidal during the period of time in which she accumulated the 40 hours of footage from which the movie's final cut was made, filming with digital devices that seems to have taken place over several years and on several different continents. Writers who are familiar with Akerman's work (and I don't count myself among that number) regard No Home Movie as a daunting, very difficult film, but one that is intensely rewarding and an important late masterpiece. I think that it's possible for a movie to be simultaneously a great and challenging work as well as a picture that is so eccentric, so intimate, and so rebarbative that you would have trouble recommending the picture to most people -- the picture is haunting, but it is also fantastically tedious and off-putting. I am glad No Home Movie exists and happy that I watched it, indeed, several times, But I'm not sure that I would screen the movie at a film festival or, even, for a film study group. People are likely to react with such vehement scorn that debates and quarrels would undoubtedly ensue and feelings might get hurt.
No Home Movie starts with four minute long shot of a slender fragile-looking tree battered by a strong, howling wind. The shot is framed in a random way and we can see a sliver of murky, dusty desert in the background. Then, there is another very long shot of a chubby man sunbathing with his back to the camera in a park where dogs are romping. (The anonymous guy is the only man in a film in which all other figures are women.) Next, we see an equally long (in time) shot of an enclosed back yard with a crippled-looking lawn chair half collapsed on the grass. This is evidently the backyard of an expensively appointed manor in which an old woman, Natalia Akerman, lives. Natalia is Chantal Akerman's mother and the 115 minute film is an elliptical chronicle of her death. (Although the film doesn't tell us anything about Natalia's death, I am aware that she died in April 2014.) The movie consists largely of still interiors, empty frames of the kind featured in Ozu movies -- mostly half-open doors, shadowy thresholds, images of unmade beds and kitchen counters. The camera placement is haphazard: sometimes the old woman ambles into the frame; sometimes, we see Chantal Akerman or her sister Sylvain padding about, often barefooted. In many shots, no one ever appears although we can hear footsteps off-screen or voices or someone fumbling with furniture or clothing or cooking utensils. Akerman films some dialogue between herself and her mother, generally choosing an angle that is so unintrusive as to render the shot almost illegible -- people mutter things to one another with their backs to the camera and we can't tell who is speaking. The old woman says that she has fallen and dislocated her shoulder; she has a persistent cough. There is a conversation with the director in which her mother recalls how she and her husband were persecuted because they were Polish Jews during the Second World War. The discussions are casual, circumstantial, heavily coded with family references that the viewer can't decipher. There's some conversation about how Chantal was a picky eater as a little girl. In one long discussion, mother and daughter debate how best to cook potatoes -- whether to peel them or leave the skin on (it contains all the vitamins the old woman says.) Chantal ruefully observes that, although she's a lousy cook, she knows how to prepare potatoes. The film leaves the impression that Chantal Akerman is always traveling, more or less, living out of a suitcase. She apparently Skypes or Zoom calls her mother daily. We see her filming her mother on the laptop screen when Chantal says that she is in Oklahoma. The director's relationship to her mother is obviously very close -- Chantal calls her mother "mommy" and is always signing off with "hugs and kisses." There is some conversation about Jewish ritual -- the old lady is irritated about someone who was "too orthodox" and kept a kosher kitchen. An infant must be eight days old because he is going for his bris. Chantal says that she is feeling "good which is rare for (her)." Neither Chantal nor her mother are willing to hang up or conclude their Skype call and they keep talking about "having to go" but the conversation just continues on and on. Akerman slowly moves her digital device -- it's probably something like a cell-phone camera -- closer and closer to the screen. The old woman's eyes on the lap-top become a huge blur, dark craters moving dimly on the pixilated computer screen. Then, abruptly, we see an utterly empty desert; the camera in a moving car is shooting the landscape which rushes by with disorienting speed . These landscape shots in which we sometimes glimpse other vehicles off the road on barren hillsides or far away palm trees continue for about five minutes -- gulches, dry washes, tracks leading into the desert. Next, we see foul-looking murky water with waves rippling across the edge of what seems to be a flooded beach -- there is an ominous shadow cast on the sandy bottom of the seashore, under the slimy, scummy water: this is either someone standing motionlessly on the edge of the water or the shadow of Chantal who is filming with the camera pointed down at the submerged sand. This shadow announces the visual motif that will dominate the second half of the picture. The bourgeois house now is filmed like a labyrinth in a horror movie -- there are mysterious moving shadows at the edge of the frame. We see more unmade beds, empty rooms, dark thresholds -- sometimes, the curtains are parted a little and we get a glimpse of the street outside the house, a busy thoroughfare where cars are making left-hand turns in traffic. There's another meal scene, also shot from behind the old woman and completely uncommunicative. Sylvain, Chantal's younger sister is eating with the old woman. The old lady is having trouble swallowing, chokes a few times, and complains that Chantal makes her anxious. (She says she doesn't like to be filmed.) In a dark and gloomy room, the women prepare to go for a short walk with the old woman -- there are Filipino housemaids and nurses around, chubby, smiling and solicitous middle-aged women. The old woman debates whether anyone needs to bring their purse but, of course,"we must have money with us." The old woman is resting in recliner, head back, breathing stentorously. Chantal and Sylvain try to keep her awake so she can "tell them stories" but the old woman keeps falling asleep. These shots are taken from a discrete distance and we can't really see Chantal's mother -- she is just a shadow among shadows. Gradually, she seems to be vanishing into the dark rooms and dim corridors. The old woman now is immobile -- we don't see her get up from the recliner. There's some discussion that Chantal is in Venice and Sylvain and the old woman talk about accompanying Chantal to the film festival there -- it seems that they attended two years earlier and "dressed her (Chantal) to the nines" in a "tuxedo" for an event. One of the Filipino women is interviewed by Chantal. Chantal talks about how her mother fled Poland where the people were very "harsh"; the SS came and took both mother and father to a concentration camp, Auschwitz, back in Poland. "Oh the Jews," the Filipino woman exclaims. She maintains a completely cheerful expression, an enigmatic half-smile throughout the whole conversation -- it's obvious that she has no idea what Chantal is talking about and, I think, the woman's bemused and kindly expression and her complete incomprehension as to the horrors that she is being told is, perhaps, the best and most rational response to such a story. "She was in a concentration camp," Chantal says, "and that's why she is the way she is." There is a cut to the desert, this time the terrain rocketing past much more quickly than before -- we really can't see anything but canyons full of yellowish light and grey mountains. There is a long still shot of a wadi in the absolutely desolate desert -- it reads like an image from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and has a mortuary aspect. We see a level field with the wind moving in the grass. Sitting in her small room in her mother's house, Chantal is pulling on her shoes. She has her big suitcase packed. She glances at the window where the curtain is partly open and, then, pulls the curtain shut. The film concludes with a minute long shot of living room in the house, expensive and tasteful art in the middle of the frame with some candelabra on a marble mantle -- a portrait of bourgeois European civilization, two shadowy alcoves into which some wan light is leaking to the right and left of the painting and the marble. It's an image of comfort, luxury, justice, and death.
The desert scenes and the bush in the windstorm were shot in Israel. It is the Promised Land, but also the terrain of death. (I know this from commentary on the movie -- there's no sign as to the location of these shots in the picture itself.) The old woman is gone and Chantal is leaving her mother's home which is now "No Home" for her. This is not a home movie, but, instead, a film about having "no home" or having a home defined by the shadowy, murky gloom that surrounds death, that is, a "no" home or home to the ultimate negation which is mortality. With its perfect reticence, its dignified tact, its grimly nondescript interiors and murmured conversations about memories from a half-century earlier, No Home Movie manages to achieve considerable power. About half of the movie really can't be clearly apprehended -- it's off to the side, out of focus, or merely a sound off-screen. This is life lived under the shadow of the great mystery, death. Whether the film's emotional payoff, which is delicate, haunting, and melancholy, makes up for the picture's difficulties is a critical assessment that each viewer will have to make for him or herself.
No comments:
Post a Comment