What if Isolation and Repetition brings comfort? And what if those are the only escape from hard times?

Our everyday lives are often repetitive that we sometimes find crushingly boring, meaningless, and less-than-alive. It is a cycle that keeps repeating. A seamless system of repetitions.

Wake up, eat, go to work, go home, shower, eat, sleep.

Such is life under capitalism.

But at times, repetition is the only comfort we can have in a troubled world. In a world where we cannot control a lot of things to our comfort, the controlled repetition of everyday life can be an escape from the uncontrollable, constantly-changing external lives of us.

Dreariness and Repetition is a thing we can comfortably expect and control. It’s easy to handle workdays without new things, because we know what will happen, and we know how we will handle it.

We have autonomy in repetition. We have freedom in isolation. Isolation brings us comfort.

But what if the repetition breaks down? Will we be glad or angry

Trigger Warnings: Suicide mention, Suicidal Ideation, COVID-19 Mentions

Enter Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a film by Chantal Akerman. Widely known for its’ soul-crushing length of three hours and twelve minutes that consists of a woman doing her chores with no music, minimal dialogue, and snail’s pace. It is considered a rite of passage for both cinephiles and film students for this reason alone. It is THE quintessential “boring European movie”.

All we see in the three hour runtime is just a woman doing her chores and housework.

Wake up, make bed, eat breakfast, tidy up home, groceries, stare at the void, shower, eat dinner, meet client, sleep.

That is all what we see in the movie. The life of Jeanne Dielman. Nothing more, nothing less. For three full hours. The title itself is literally her home address!

it is minimalism taken to the realistic extreme. It forces you to think, it forces you to focus, and it forces you to feel. Because this is reality.

The slow pacing makes all the scenes where Jeanne Dielman does her chores feels longer and more true to reality. A good chunk of 30-40 minutes is dedicated to scenes of her cooking. It’s not like in cooking shows where we see cooking in a quick way, we see cooking in real time. Boringly.

Even bathing scenes feels like a chore thanks to the pacing and filmmaking style. Yes, we see Jeanne Dielman strip naked and wash herself, but the pacing makes it felt like an actual chore.

Because such is life. It is full of boring repetitive chores.

Even when other people comes to the screen such as her son and ‘clients’ only reinforces the loneliness and isolationist life of Jeanne Dielman, since they all have very minimal dialogue of mundane things.

“How was school?”, “Eh, fine i guess. Skipped PE to meet someone”, “Don’t do that”, “Okay Mom, but I was with a friend”, “Alright, let’s continue reading”, “Okay”

Nothing fancy. Just a mother and her school-aged son. Just another chore. In Jeanne Dielman’s life, conversation is just a chore.

Fortunately, it’s not all boring chores in house. We see Jeanne Dielman go out and do things like shopping for groceries, go to bank, and go to a nice cafe.

It’s scenes like this that makes us appreciate the little things in life. The little trips to minimarkets, the cafes we frequently go to, the roads we travel. It’s what makes everyday life bearable, it’s kind of like what Studio Ghibli movies does to you, but in a more realistic way.

And even then we get a little backstory and personality on Jeanne. She has a penchant for attention to detail, shows signs of perfectionism, had a late husband who died, lives with her teenaged son alone, has a sister in Canada, works as an occasional babysitter and a prostitute when her son isn’t around. We can see that Jeanne Dielman is having a hard time in her life outside of isolation. And it’s possible that she sees her dreary life as an escape.

It’s a brutally isolated repetitive life for Jeanne Dielman. And arguably, she is purposefully isolating herself from her implied terrible reality.

But at the same time, she finds comfort, control, and agency in her calculated, and isolated everyday life.

Because ultimately, she can control her life. This is the life that makes her feel like herself. Free of other people and external threats from controlling her.

But it doesn’t last forever for her. While the first two (of three) days depicted in the movie shows a carefully-constructed, scheduled. clean, and controlled everyday life, the third day is where things breaks down. The repetition breaks. She is forced to get out from isolation.

And Jeanne Dielman does not like it.

Her details disappears.

A potato drops, a shoe drops, a button in a clothing is gone and you can’t find the exact same button after going to three tailors. There is a level of anger that you could feel in the smallest of mistakes in your life. There’s nothing more annoying than seeing a clothing…missing a button. There’s nothing more terrible than not being able to find the exact same button for the outfit. Now the outfit looks shitty forever.

Have you ever had your days ruined from smallest of mistakes? This film shows it in subtle detail through Delphine Seyrig’s face and movements as Jeanne Dielman loses control of her life. The thesis of this part of the movie is: One mistake sometimes ruins the entire day, and Chantal Akerman portrays it realistically.

Mistakes in life makes agency in life slowly disappearing. And it does not stop there. In the span of hours, foods are getting overcooked, usual coffee tastes bad (the screenshot shows her having to brew a coffee from scratch because she’s pissed over it),

Then her favourite table at the cafe is occupied.

It’s small, but you can feel the crushing betrayal over it. It’s like someone is taking away your friend from you. And the other seat don’t feel as good as the usual. We all definitely felt betrayed over smallest stuff like that in our lives. And to top it all off, your favourite waitress that usually asks you for orders and knows your favourite menus are not there.

Does it felt like something is leaving you behind? Yes.

Your comfort is leaving you behind, and forces you to get out. But the thing is, you are comfortable, and content with the repetitive comfort. It’s the only thing you can have, and you can’t have it suddenly.

Jeanne Dielman’s life is suddenly changing to a direction she does not expect, nor want to.

The last minutes of the movie now shows her job – prostitution. She must service a john. And a john gets serviced indeed. But something is wrong: Jeanne Dielman feels pleasure from her job.

She felt pleasure from the job that wasn’t meant to give you pleasure. Throughout the movie, we see her “job” being…..just another job. Just something to get bread in her mouth. No pleasure, no hate. A job.

But feeling pleasure in a job where you normally won’t….that’s also an unwanted change in life.

Jeanne Dielman’s comfort zone changes, but…..her carefully-constructed life is being taken away.

In the last minute, we see her life being taken away. For Jeanne Dielman, a person whose life got taken away previously, this is an unwelcome change. Her dreary life now no longer gives comfort

It is happening again. And this time, she can’t go back to her previous dreary life. She WILL want a different life, and it’s unfair.

And what happens next is her last attempt to reclaim her dreary life that has gave her comfort and agency.

She murders the john. To her, he is taking her life away. And she doesn’t want it to happen. Therefore, he is responsible for taking away her comfort zone.

Now, how would you reclaim your comfort zone?

This is the question that Chantal Akerman asks us, to understand Jeanne Dielman’s desperate action. But the next scene shows that she is never getting her life back.

She must go.

And fade to black. The life of Jeanne Dielman ends.

That is all you see in the three-hour-and-twelve-minutes runtime. Nothing really happens, but something is building up, only to crash in the last minutes. This move is boring, but it asks you to see. It asks you to notice. It asks you to feel.

It is technically, an action movie. In that the action is in you. The uninterrupted 7-minute shot of Jeanne Dielman bleeding to death in an attempt to commit suicide made me think.

What would you do when Change brings pain? Would you revert to nothingness?

As I am typing this, I am currently having carpal tunnel syndrome on both hands. So, not being able to do anything forced me to find something to occupy my ADHD-brain with.

And yet, I chose this film. On paper, this should be a nightmare for me who has ADHD and therefore continously losing focus. Yeah, I did lost focus few times. But I spent more time focusing.

Because this is just what people call, life

I had a bad event that resulted in a months-long grief in 2015. What I did not talk about was how my days went.

In the days following it, it was all mundane. Nothing exciting, just me at home, doing chores, and occasional succumbs to dark thoughts and depression. And crying myself to sleep.

I reverted to dreariness. To escape from grief.

My routine was boring, but it might have helped me to become numb from the pain. I’ve become more numb to anything thanks to everyday of boring, mundane life. I’ve begun to think that being at home, in dreary life is comfort. Better than the scary world of the outside. (No, I am NOT being a Hikikomori)

But it’s the reason why I am still alive to this day. I found comfort in dreariness. Dreariness lets me revert to a place where nothing changes. Even when i succumb to dark thoughts, nothing bad will happen. Dreariness was escapism for me.

Technically, I have died. And this dreariness is just where my ghost live in. This repetitive life is peaceful.

Repetition brings comfort when variance brings pain.

Some time ago, I attempted to add variance in my dreary work-from-home life by doing fun drawings. All it did was giving me Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Maybe it’s my body screaming “No, I don’t want this. Stay living a mundane life, please” While it will go away, I wonder, is variance in life an 'invasion’ to comfort?

Is repetition truly a comfort zone?

While I thought about it, I thought about this pandemic. Isolation is what keeps us alive. As long as we all stay at home, staying true to our dreary life as comfort from a pandemic.

“Staying home saves lives” indeed.

I have stayed home for the rest of 2020 and 2021. The outside world is bad. And isolating myself brings a small amount of peace. Small, but peace none the less. It is what repetition brings. Dreariness helped me move on from the many disasters around me.

Then as I am writing this, Something happened.

My life suddenly changed for the worse drastically, in a way that I might be losing my current comfortable mundane life. I don’t want to lose it. Let’s hope that I won’t lose it. Again, I wonder, are changes in life 'invasion’ to comfort?

Is reverting to dreariness and repetition a way to stop the pain in change?

The question keeps ringing in my head. And the ending of the film stays in my mind. What if I lose my current dreariness that is my comfort? Find a new repetition, they said. But I persist. It’s like a person being taken away from you. You don’t look for replacement.

How will I able to reclaim it? What should I do when reverting to dreariness becomes impossible?

Maybe the answer should remain unanswered. As long as we stay at home. As long as we make dreariness an escape from reality.

#review #writeup #Letterboxd #serious #confessional #ChantalAkerman