Storytelling is where life experience and narrative technique meet. Compelling characters are just important, if not more, as narrative structure. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels focuses on character development as a part of the narrative structure itself. The story is being told through one woman’s experiences, Jeanne Dielman. The story goes as the audience learn more about Jeanen Dielman. Chantal Akerman wrote and directed Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. This film was influenced by Akerman’s life growing up but also shows her technique as an auteur. In an interview she said that cinema is about time and space. In Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, Akerman uses time to hold the tension. Unnecessary cuts would have distracted audience from viewing their subject. She manipulates the space around Jeanne Dielman to depict confinement. Jeanne Dielman is confined to motherhood, domesticity, and literally her apartment.

Parenthood is one of the few careers that last a lifetime. There aren’t two week notices or resignation letters, maybe a random fax like the one Pat Reilly sent days before taking a job as a head coach for the Miami Heat. The point is once a person signs up to be a parent he/she have to stay one even if you decided to be a parent as a young woman looking to escape her war ravaged home. At the end of the first day we watch Jean, she and her son, Sylvain, have an awkward conversation about the birds and the bees. In this conversation, Sylvain was curious about his mother’s marriage to his father. She explained when she met his father and when she decided to

marry him. She married his father because the war had just ended and money was hard to come by. Her family thought it best to marry a wealthy man she had met. She obliged. For her, marriage was a business decision that would give her financial security. Money doesn’t buy love, on its own but it can keep a marriage together. I would love to go off on a tangent about the business of marriage but Jeanne Dielman’s story is enough. She was all in on marriage and ended up with a child we aren’t sure she ever wanted.

The audience meets Mrs. Dielman at a point in her life where she’d been a mother longer than she’d been a wife. She still does everything for her son, who is between an adolescent and a young adult. From cooking all of his meals to polishing his shoes in the morning, she completes most of her motherly tasks in the kitchen. Akerman and her cinematographer, Babette Mangote, used frame within a frame to show how she was stuck in a life of domesticity and motherhood. In the kitchen, she often stood in her doorway while she cooked. The kitchen seems small and crammed. As we watch her violently polish her son’s shoes in Day 3 her actions show her growing frustration with her life.

Mrs. Dielman doesn’t have friends. That might be a little presumptuous but we never see her talk to anyone about herself other than her son. She’ll share a quick response about the status of her day or the well-being of her son but she doesn’t have anyone that can help her shoulder a heavy emotional load. We only see her outside in order to run errands. Errands are the ugly brother of housework. Errands don’t get completed at home but they might as well be. Jeanne goes grocery shopping which is a domestic chore or one performed daily when you have to feed two people instead of one. Her life revolved around doing what others thought she should do and she was sick of it.

As children we all played the staring game because its a challenge for kids to sit still. Parents’ favorite game may be the quiet game when someone just needs quiet. As the audience, we were engaged in a staring contest/quiet game with this film. It was a test of will. The audience was rewarded important information about Jeanne Dielman. We watch her bathe, cook meals, and shine shoes all without time jumps. She fully completes each task. The most significant use of time is when Jeanne Dielman is sitting in her living room chair on Day 3. She sits in a chair and we watch her for a couple minutes. Screen time turns real time into an eternity. Theres internal dialogue within Jeanne Dielman and the audience. “What is she doing? Wait is she just sitting there? She doesn’t look okay. She isn’t ok.” She sat there exhausted, in her mind searching for another mindless task to complete.

Jeanne Dielman’s apartment was nicely decorated but felt like the place where Mrs. Dielman was serving time under house arrest. She only left to complete errands and that one time she and her son took a walk. Chantal Akerman used framing to show her confined to her life and her apartment. Akerman didn’t use closeups but framed her instead. When Jeanne Dielman cooks she is framed within a door which framed by the wall. The composition shows how much space is limited. She is confined to the role of personal chef for her son. She is often framed by something in the background like a China cabinet. In the end when she was struggling in bed with a “john”, she is confined by the space on the bed. She is literally trapped by the man and by the way the shot is framed. Maybe she thinks she will be confined to the career of a sex-worker.

There are dozens of cliches about living with less than perfect circumstances. “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” “Its not about the fall, its about how you get up.” Cliches are great but aren’t always applicable to the real world. Jeanne Dielman was a woman without agency. Her circumstances weren't of her own doing so she did her best to deal with it by not dealing with it. Mrs. Dielman was a hamster on a wheel and destined to die in her apartment alone, unless her son still needed to polish his shoes. Cliches couldn’t help Jeanne Dielman. There isn’t a handbook for the oppressed or disenfranchised. There’s only a pat on the back and a “good luck”.