A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.
Chantal Akerman's feature is one of the few 'feminist' movies that's as interesting aesthetically as politically.
– ,
Time Out,
9 Feb 2006
fresh:
Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.
– Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Chicago Reader,
17 Jun 2003
fresh:
Jeanne Dielman deals in unadorned facts. It's about the looks and sounds of ordinary things and people, which it records with such... unsettling clarity that it has the effect of finding threats in mundane objects and doom in [the] commonplace.
– Vincent Canby,
New York Times,
15 Jan 2005
fresh:
Jeanne Dielman is immersion cinema, a brilliant example of maximal minimalism that fuses viewer with subject so profoundly, the marathon experience transcends simple spectatorship.