Voted by the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine as the Best Film ever made.
A woman cooks. A woman cleans. A woman runs errands. A woman takes care of her son. A woman sleeps. A woman wakes. Repeat the cycle. Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece illuminates the mundanity and boredom of life’s daily rhythms into an investigation of womanhood, stasis, tragedy and order, with Delphine Seyrig in the titular role – a performance of near-perfect stillness.
Focusing almost exclusively on Jeanne Dielman’s day-to-day existence, punctuated by the visit of clients for sex work before her son returns from school, the film’s methodical pacing produces a hypnotising effect that draws the viewer in. It’s an effect most keenly felt in the space of a cinema.
Enshrined by critics and scholars as the Greatest Film of All Time in the 2022 edition of Sight & Sound’s famed decennial poll, and the first film directed by a woman to be given that accolade, Jeanne Dielman stands as a modernist masterpiece.
