Je tu il elle. Chantal Akerman. 1974. ⚃
[thirty minutes pass]
“OK, I need somebody to be naked in front of the camera for most of the movie… OK, I’ll just do it myself.”
Said no male director ever.
So this is just Akerman herself in a room. With a camera. It’s hypnotic. On the other hand, I’m really drunk, so I don’t really knwo.
Know.
The most shocking thing here is that mattress without any bedding. I mean, I’m horrified!!!1!
[ten minutes pass]
But when we leave that room, the tension of the movie just seems to go poof. The truck driver just doesn’t seem to be that interesting… Which is just weird.
I think there’s some unresolved class issues going on here.
[ten minutes pass]
The first half is fascinating, but the middle part is excruciating. The guy is saying nothing interesting, and the shots reflect that. And it’s so… fake… the truck driver is moving the wheel around like he’s on a dodgem ride. And he talks like… he’s an actor, which he is. Everything he does reads fake, from driving to peeing (taking a tenth of the time it really does).
If this movie had just been Akerman on a mattress, it’d have been 1000x better.
But the last bit is good.
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