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Chantal Akerman's Journal of a Solitude, the most agoraphobic of road movies. The filmmaker enters the screen with her back turned, "a tiny white room on the ground floor" that, as a joke on the severe monochrome, she paints blue and green. Furniture rearranged and removed in between languid fades to black until only a mattress is left, and even that is propped up against the window to control the lighting of the image. (The opening session is a deadpan illustration of the arrangement of a minimalistic mise en scène, with letters scattered on the floor lest any should miss the point.) All the sugar in the world cannot ease the bitterness of a breakup (cf. Makavejev's Sweet Movie). Char's slow snow, "Me and My Shadow," a delicate sonata of footsteps and distant traffic and the heroine's own breathing and serene-neurotic thoughts: "First it took three pages to express myself. Then I wrote the same thing in six pages..." From close-up to long shot, Akerman on a drizzly highway thumbing for a hitch. Granular views of the scruffy truck driver (Niels Arestrup), pit stops (jukebox and aquarium in the frame, American gangster flick outside of it), handy release and confession. (His words bounce off her impassive smile, a monologue about wives and kids and rich relatives and growing old and another evocation of austere cinema, daydreams when there's nothing but "telephone poles and the hum of the machine.") At the end of the line the elusive anchor, the former girlfriend (Claire Wauthion) who grudgingly offers sandwiches and a bed for vigorous romping. Freedom and despair braided in Akerman's feature debut, the intense sensation of a stark camera and the perpetual nakedness of a drifting auteur. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |