Kinks – "Something Better Beginning" (1965)

I held your hand and I sighed 

Is this the start of another heart break? 

Or something better beginning? 

This is the first 2 or 3 lines post of the new year, which is going to be full of change for me.

I’m hoping that today marks something better beginning for me.  But when you make a big change in your life, you never know how it will turn out.  

As the old Russian proverb says, “Maybe rain, maybe snow – maybe yes, maybe no.”

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It is simply inconceivable to me that anyone who loves movies would say that Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – a 1975 film directed by the late Chantal Akerman when she was only 25 years old – was the greatest film of all time.  But that’s exactly what 1639 film critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics recently did when they voted it to the #1 spot on the British Film Institute’s “100 Greatest Films of All Time” list. 

I don’t mind that the movie is slow-paced and almost entirely devoid of action.  I became interested in Jeanne and her life, as mundane and banal as it seemed.  (I think people are inherently interesting – even people who are unremarkable and “lead lives of quiet desperation,” to quote Thoreau.)

And I give credit to the director for coming up with the idea of making a very long movie showing a woman going through her daily routine in what often feels like real time.  

But Jeanne Dielman is better characterized as a concept for a movie rather than a movie.  It eschews so many of the creative elements that come together to make a movie a great movie.

There are no camera movements – the camera is entirely stationary throughout the course of a shot –  and the editing is rudimentary at best.  There’s no music in the movie, and virtually no dialogue – I’m guessing that you could fit all the lines uttered by the actors in Jeanne Dielman on ten pages.

Jeanne Dielman preparing veal cutlets

Click here to watch a four-and-a-half-minute scene of the movie’s titular character preparing veal cutlets for dinner.  It’s quite representative of the movie as a whole: there are no words or music . . . no camera movement or editing . . . just four and a half minutes of a middle-aged woman prepping veal cutlets.

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As I pointed out in the previous post, the first of the three days depicted in Jeanne Dielman are uneventful.

The second day doesn’t go quite as smoothly – Jeanne’s usual routine is disrupted a bit.  Here’s how writer-director Jayne Loader summarized the action of the second hour of the film:

If the first day is a usual day when everything goes smoothly, we see that the second day throws Jeanne slightly off balance. Because a client stays longer than usual, Jeanne burns the potatoes that were cooking on the stove.  With her hair slightly mussed, she wanders from room to room with the pot of burned potatoes, wondering what to do with them. 

It is a powerful moment in the film, the first time we have ever seen her lose her composure or perform an action that is not completely efficient. 

Because Jeanne has no potatoes left in the house, she must go again to market.  Dinner is late.  And although she is quick to reassert the family routine by forcing her son to take their nightly walk around the block, although he would prefer to read, [her son] Sylvan destroys her day further by embarrassing questions and confessions about sex. 

Jeanne Dielman peeling potatoes

If you weren’t paying close attention, day three might not seem much different than day two.  But the wheels have come completely off the bus.  From Jayne Loader’s review:

The third day is even more disrupted.  Jeanne fails to button her robe completely and gets shoe polish on her cuff while polishing Sylvan's shoes.  Both precision and efficiency are eroded.  She moves in and out of rooms turning their lights on and off as she goes, with no idea of what to do once in them.  

She arrives too early at the post office and grocery and is unable to locate a button for Sylvan's coat at the several shops she visits.  She washes her dishes over and over and kneads a meatloaf interminably.  When her coffee tastes strange, she throws it out and makes a new pot but finds she cannot drink even that.  

At the restaurant where she usually goes after shopping, her usual waitress has already gotten off, and a stranger occupies her favorite seat.  It is an older, business-like woman with short hair and no makeup who smokes and is engrossed in her work.  Traditional, feminine Jeanne is literally displaced by a new kind of woman.  

At the shops Jeanne makes an attempt to talk to the sales people about her family.  Previously she had been pleasantly formal to them.  She even tries for the first time to play with the baby she sits for, but it cries whenever she picks it up. 

*     *     *     *     *

About three hours into the movie, things really fall apart.

Jeanne welcomes a paying customer into her bedroom on each of the first two days of the movie, but we don’t her undressing or having sex with those men.  (You see her spread a towel on her bed each time – in hopes of preventing a wet spot on the coverlet? – and you see her accept payment from the men as they are leaving.  But that’s it.)

But on the third day, the audience is admitted to the bedroom to see Jeanne’s client on top of her, engaged in what Alex in A Clockwork Orange called “the old in-out.”

(SPOILER ALERT!  I’m about to reveal exactly what happens at the end of Jeanne Dielman!) 

Jeanne doesn’t look happy during her rogering – she throws her head from side to side and grimaces.  But eventually you figure out that her expressions are not indications that she is disgusted by her client, but rather that she is becoming sexually excited to the point of having a powerful orgasm – despite his utter lack of interest in satisfying her.

Jeanne Dielman nearing “la petite mort”

The scene showing her gradually approaching an orgasmic state and then finally achieving it is astonishing.  At first, the depiction of her having intercourse with her once-a-week client couldn’t be more mechanical.  I assumed she was gritting her teeth and counting the minutes until her partner finished his business and left, but I was very, very wrong.

A few minutes after they finish, we see Jeanne sitting at her dressing table while her paramour is resting in her bed.  Suddenly, she grabs a pair of scissors and stabs him in the neck until he is dead.

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I don’t know what to make of that scene.   

I probably would have ended the movie when Jeanne achieved her utterly unexpected orgasm.  Delphine Seyrig – the actress who portrays Jeanne – turns in an acting tour de force in that scene.  And the fact that Jeanne somehow achieves an orgasm in spite of the circumstances gives the viewer plenty to ponder.

Instead, the director has Jeanne inexplicably commit an act of shocking violence.  

I didn’t buy it.

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Jeanne Dielman is an interesting and original movie.  But it is not the greatest film of all time – no way, no how.

Its ascension to the #1 spot on the BFI is mostly attributable to the fact that the BFI invited hundreds of woke new voters to participate in this year’s “Greatest Films” poll, as legendary writer/director Paul Schrader has pointed out:

The sudden appearance of Jeanne Dielman in the number one slot undermines the poll's credibility. It feels off, as if someone had put their thumb on the scale. . . . By expanding the voting community and the point system this year’s poll reflects not a historical continuum but a politically correct rejiggering.  Ackerman’s film is a favorite of mine, a great film, a landmark film but its unexpected number one rating does it no favors.  Jeanne Dielman will from this time forward be remembered not only as an important film in cinema history but also as a landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.

One British critic confirmed Schrader’s theory when he explained his vote for Jeanne Dielman in these words: “It’s high time a woman won.”

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“Something Better Beginning” is the final track on the Kinks’ second album, Kinda Kinks, which was released in 1965.

Like most of the better Kinks’ songs, “Something Better Beginning” was written by Ray Davies, who was a much more thoughtful lyricist than Lennon or McCartney.  

Click here to listen to “Something Better Beginning.”

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.

George Baker Selection – "Una Paloma Blanca" (1975)

Once I had my share of losing

Once they locked me on a chain

The British Film Institute recently asked no fewer than 1639 film critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics to list what they thought were the best movies of all time.  

Based on those ballots, the BFI put together a“100 Greatest Films of All Time” list, which ranked Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – a 1975 film directed by 25-year-old Chantal Akerman – the greatest movie ever.

Be honest.  You’ve never heard of Jeanne Dielman, much less seen it.

Jeanne Dielman preparing veal cutlets

I was right there with you until last week, when I checked out a DVD of Jeanne Dielman from my local public library and watched it over the course of two nights.  (The movie is over three hours long.)

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Jeanne Dielman – which is almost three and a half hours long – depicts three days in the life of its titular character, a middle-aged Belgian widow who lives with her teenaged son.

Here’s how critic Jayne Loader summarized the first hour of the film, which depicts one day in the life of Jeanne Dielman:

Jeanne gets up, puts on her dressing gown, and chooses her son’s clothes.  She lights a fire in his room, picks up his shoes and takes them to the kitchen, where she shines them, lights the stove, grinds the coffee beans and makes coffee.  She wakes her son; he eats while she dresses.   She says goodbye to him, and gives him money taken from a blue and white china crock on the dining table. 

She washes the dishes, makes her son's bed and folds it into a couch, makes her own bed and lays a towel over her coverlet.  She shops and runs errands, returns to her apartment, and begins to prepare dinner.  She sits with her neighbor's child, eats her lunch, and returns the baby to its mother.  

The doorbell rings.  She admits a man, takes his hat and coat, and leads him into the bedroom.  She leads him to the front door, gives him his hat and coat, and takes money from him, which she puts in the blue china crock.  She opens the window in her bedroom, puts the rumpled towel in the clothes hamper, bathes, cleans the tub, and dresses. 

She closes the bedroom window and takes dinner off the stove.  Her son comes home.  They eat dinner immediately: soup, meat and potatoes.  She tells him not to read while eating.  He puts his books away.  She clears the table and helps him with his homework.  She knits, and glances through the newspaper, until it is time for them to take their evening walk around the block.  They unfold his sofa bed.  He reads while she undresses.  She turns off the stove, kisses him, turns out the lights, and at last goes to sleep.

[NOTE: I think Jeanne Dielman puts a towel on top of her bed so she can service her client without worry about a wet spot staining her coverlet.  I presume she opens the window after he’s left to air out her bedroom so it doesn’t smell like sex.]

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s how one critic very accurately describes Akerman’s directorial style:

No movie has so rigorously applied the fly-on-the-wall point-of-view to this extent.  Static cameras are set up at various locations around the apartment (and, on those occasions when Jeanne goes out, at fixed locations along her route) to record any action that occurs in front of them.  

Jeanne Dielman peeling potatoes

Traditional cinematography is entirely abandoned.  There are no establishing shots or close-ups.  At times, the images are of empty corridors or rooms, with sounds indicating something is happening off-camera. At no time do any of the cameras move.  

A cynic might remark that Akerman’s approach is to stick a camera on a tripod, point it at a room, wander off, and come back in 11 minutes.

Here’s what another critic said about the film:

Despite the widespread critical acclaim, Jeanne Dielman has never gained much traction outside of its niche audience in large part because it’s beyond a challenge to sit through.  Being fascinating and unique, two qualities unquestionably in evidence here, don’t automatically deserve praise and, because of the film’s high quotient of tediousness, I find it impossible to recommend to any but the most devoted of experimental art film lovers.  It works very well, however, as a cure for insomnia.

Click here to watch a four-and-a-half-minute shot of Jeanne Dielman preparing veal cutlets for dinner, which is a typical scene from the movie.  

As noted in the above description of the movie, the camera doesn’t move – it’s completely static.  Given that there is no one other than Jeanne in the shot, it’s not surprising that there is no dialogue.

I would guess that the entirety of the very sparse dialogue in Jeanne Dielman would take up no more than ten printed pages.

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Jeanne Dielman is sometimes described as an early feminist masterpiece.

But it seems to me that the movie could just as easily be about a male character – a Jean, not a Jeanne.

Imagine Jean Dielman waking up and getting out of bed, making coffee and eating a croissant while reading the morning newspaper, shaving and getting dressed, taking a streetcar to the office where he works as a bookkeeper, adding numbers with the help of an adding machine and entering the sums in a ledger, stopping at a bar near his office for a glass of beer at the end of the workday, going to a delicatessen and buying something to take home for dinner, eating while reading the evening paper, watching a sporting event on TV, brushing his teeth, and going to bed.

Jeanne Dielman drinking coffee

Maybe throw in a weekly visit to a discreet neighborhood prostitute – someone like Jeanne Dielman herself – and you’d have a movie that’s the male mirror image of Jeanne Dielman.

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“Una Paloma Blanca” (which means “a white dove” in Spanish) was recorded in 1975 by the George Baker Selection – whose 1969 hit, “Little Green Bag,” was prominently featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.   

The George Baker Selection is Dutch – not Belgian, like the titular character of Jeanne Dielman – but the record was a #1 hit in Belgium in 1975, which was the year that Jeanne Dielman was released.  That’s close enough for government work.

Click here to listen to “Paloma Blanca” by the George Baker Selection.

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

J. Geils Band – "(Ain't Nothin' But a) House Party" (1973)

It ain’t nothin’ but a party, baby

It ain’t nothin’ but a house party

My plan was to post today about Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – the 1975 movie that the British Film Institute’s members recently voted to the #1 spot on their “100 Greatest Movies of All Time” list.

But my public library has yet to cough up the DVD of Jeanne Dielman that I put on hold a couple of weeks ago, so you’re going to have to wait a little longer for the definitive take on that movie from little ol’ 2 or 3 lines himself.   

In the meantime, we’ll talk about a film that didn’t make the BFI top 100 list – Woody Allen’s 2008 movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona – which I recently watched on Netflix.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona stars Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall.

Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with Rebecca Hall.  Neither was I – or so I thought.  It turns out I’ve seen a number of movies and TV series that she’s appeared in – most notably the 2012 BBC series Parade’s End, which was based on Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy.  (Both the Parade’s End novels and the TV series are remarkable – I recommend them both.)

Rebecca Hall

Hall’s rich socialite character in Parade’s End is a real piece of work.  When she learns she is pregnant as a result of an affair with a married man, she quickly seduces the rather dour character played by Benedict Cumberbatch while they are on a train.  She knows that the Cumberbatch character – who is honorable to a fault – will do the right thing and marry her after their encounter.  After he does just that, she continues sleeping with half the upper-class men in London, knowing that her husband will never divorce her for their son’s sake.

Back to Vicky Cristina Barcelona . . .

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Woody Allen seems to have had sex on the brain his whole life.  (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and all that – but Woody is a much bigger perv than the typical guy.)

In Manhattan, Allen’s character is a 42-year-old writer who is “dating” a 17-year-old high school girl.  (At least two women later claimed that the movie was inspired by Allen’s sexual relationship with her when she was a teenager.)

He later initiated a sexual relationship with his inamorata Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter when he was 56 and she was 21, and eventually married her.

If you’re a Generation Z’er, you’re probably wondering how Woody Allen avoided going to jail.  All I can tell you is that times were very different when Manhattan was made in 1979.

Having said that, I think Manhattan is his best movie.  Of course, I haven’t watched it in years – maybe I would find it creepy today, but I certainly didn’t in 1979 . . . and no one else did either.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona really isn’t all that different from Manhattan.

Instead of gushing over Manhattan, it gushes over Barcelona – its food, its architecture, its general je ne sais quoi.

Woody Allen was born to wear a hat

Each movie is at heart a sex fantasy for males of a certain age.  In Manhattan, of course, that male was portrayed by Allen himself.  In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the primary male character – an artist, naturally – is played by Javier Bardem.  

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In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the artist portrayed by Bardem (Juan Antonio) approaches two twenty-something American friends – Johannson (Cristina) and Hall (Vicky) – who are spending the summer in Barcelona.  He coolly offers to fly them to Orvieto, Spain in his small plane, where they will spend a weekend being wined, dined, shown around the town, and thoroughly (and jointly) rogered.

Cristina quickly succumbs to the artist’s charms, and moves in with him before you can say Jack Robinson.  The happy couple are later joined by the Penélope Cruz character (María Elena) – Juan Antonio’s ex-wife and fellow artist, who has fallen on hard times.  Pretty soon the two women are the best of friends, and Juan Antonio is having his way with both of them.  (It ain’t nothin’ but a house party for Juan Antonio.)

Juan Antonio gets Vicky into bed as well.  She goes ahead and marries her American fiancé – a rather conventional sort who is into golf and making money – but she’s fallen hard for Juan Antonio, and contemplates walking away from her husband and shacking up with the artist.

Woody seems to think that its only fair that Juan Antonio – who is clearly Allen’s alter ego – isn’t limited to having just one woman.  Woody’s a man with highly evolved ideas about sex and love, especially compared to the narrow-minded types who make up most of the world.  Why shouldn’t someone as special as he is be allowed to have his ménage à quatre  and eat it, too?

Vicky and Cristina eventually come to their senses and say sayonara to Juan Antonio and to Barcelona.  We don’t know what happens to the artist and his muy crazy (but muy hot) ex-wife after Vicky and Cristina return to the U.S.  But I’m betting the rest of his life is a Catalan Groundhog Day – repeated reunions and breakups with his ex-wife plus serial relationships with gullible young female travelers from all over the world.

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Allen pitches his movies to college-educated urbanites who see themselves as smart and sophisticated.  But if you’re looking for intellectual nutrition in your movies, look elsewhere – Vicky Cristina Barcelona is just empty calories.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is easy on the eyes, and even easier on the brain – at least the aging male brain.  It has no nudity – if it did, we’d recognize that it is essentially soft-core porn, albeit soft-core porn with a heapin’ helpin’ of intellectual pretensions.  

I’m surprised that so many critics loved it – it was included on a number of top-ten-movies-of-the-year lists.  One reviewer called it “a witty and ambiguous film that's simultaneously intoxicating and suffused with sadness and doubt.”  Another review praised it as “the work of a confident and mature artist.”

I’m not buying it, boys and girls.

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“It Ain’t Nothin’ But a House Party” was originally recorded by the Showstoppers, a Philadelphia-based soul group whose members included two of the legendary soul singer Solomon Burke’s younger brothers.

The record failed to crack the Billboard “Hot 100” when it was first released in 1967.  It was a #11 hit in the UK in 1968, and did a little better when it was subsequently re-released in the U.S.

The song has been covered by numerous groups, including the J. Geils Band.

Click here to listen to the J. Geils Band’s 1973 cover, which was titled “(Ain’t Nothin’ But a) House Party.”

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

Doors – "The End" (1967)

Ride the snake, ride the snake

To the lake, the ancient lake

The snake, he’s long

Seven miles

Ride the snake

He’s old and his skin is cold

As I noted in the previous 2 or 3 lines, the British Film Institute’s 2022 “100 Greatest Films of All Times” list omits Nashville, The Wild Bunch, The Godfather Part II and several other films that anyone with half a brain would agree belong on the “100 Greatest” list.

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The movie that was ranked #1 by the BFI’s 2022 voters is one that I’ve never heard of – much less seen.  I would bet dollars to donuts that you’ve never heard of it either.  

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – a 1975 film that was written and directed by a 25-year-old Belgian woman, Chantal Akerman – barely cracked the top forty on the BFI 2012 list.   But ten years later, it was ranked #1. 

Chantal Akerman

What explains the sudden ascension of this rather obscure movie to the top of the new list – replacing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which in turn had replaced Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane?  

 Obviously Jeanne Dielman was the same movie in 2022 that it was in 2012.  What changed in those ten years was the BFI electorate. 

The BFI sent ballots to 800-odd film critics, programmers, and academics in 2012, but invited twice as many to vote in 2022. 

The new 2022 voters apparently included a lot of politically correct  types who gave more weight to diversity than to any other criteria. 

“It’s high time a woman won,” one British critic wrote, explaining his vote for Jeanne Dielman – and probably explaining why that film ended up in the top spot of the “100 Greatest Films” list.

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As noted above, I’ve never heard of Jeanne Dielman, much less watched it.

I did find a four-minute clip from the movie on Youtube tonight and watched it.  That four-minute scene consists of a static shot of movie’s title character preparing a couple of breaded veal cutlets for dinner.

Jeanne Dielman preparing veal cutlets

First, she dredges the cutlets in flour.  Then she dips them in the whisked egg.  Then she coats the cutlets with breadcrumbs.  Finally, she covers the dish containing the cutlets with a sheet of aluminum foil and put the dish in her refrigerator.

Click here to watch that scene.

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From the reviews of it that I’ve read, Jeanne Dielman consists of roughly three hours of similarly banal scenes leading up to the disclosure of an awful secret.

I had hoped to watch the movie before publishing this post so I could tell you whether the ending justifies the three tedious hours that precede it.  Unfortunately, my local public library – which is not only the biggest and most well-funded library in the state of Maryland, but also as woke a library as you would ever hope to find – doesn’t own a DVD of Jeanne Dielman.  

So I’ve made a request through the state’s interlibrary loan network, and will hopefully be able to offer my thoughts on Jeanne Dielman in the near future.

“Why didn’t you just buy a copy of the movie, you cheap bast*rd?” I can hear you saying to yourself.

No way, dude.  It’s enough of a sacrifice that I’m going to spend three-plus hours of my life that I’ll never get back watching Jeanne Dielman – no chance I’m going to spend my own do-re-mi.

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“The End” – which was released in 1967 on the Doors’ eponymous debut album – is about 12 minutes of not very much happening.  You could say it’s the classic-rock equivalent of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  

A special remix of the recording was featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie, Apocalypse Now, which came in at #19 of the BFI “100 Greatest Movies” list.  Apocalypse Now has it moments, but you are out of your pea-pickin’ mind if you think it’s better than Coppola’s Godfather Part II.

Better than Apocalypse Now?  You bet it is! 

But that wasn’t the only time the BFI voters picked the wrong movie by the right director.  For example, they picked three Stanley Kubrick movies for the “100 Greatest” list: The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket and Clockwork Orange should have been ranked ahead of those movies.  

Hell, I might even rank Eyes Wide Shut and Lolita – hot messes, both of them – above 2001.  A friend of mine once ascribed the legendary status of 2001 to the fact that almost everyone who saw when it was first released (which was 1968) went to the theatre high, and I think he was 100% correctimundo.

Click here to listen to “The End.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.