Print
Email
Share
The film is one of an almost symphonic movement...
Marsh: Very well-said.. You know, Anna is not unlike another film we’ve discussed at length in these pages before, Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray—like this, Rohmer’s film is about a despondent young woman meeting, and largely failing to connect to, other lost souls through Europe. But where Rohmer’s film is lithe and sun-kissed, ending on a note of hope and romance, Akerman’s is in a way quite a dark and moody thing, and in the end it feels more despairing. Though I agree that the film is one of an almost symphonic movement, unfurling slowly but with a precise rhythm, the film also has a sense of a deepening isolation, a loneliness calcifying and a sadness renewed.
Anna, Akerman’s surrogate, never finds happiness (with the exception of a monologue in which she recounts a pleasant but unexpected lesbian affair to her mother, which she recalls with genuine fondness, Anna remains distant and morose throughout), and Akerman offers no promise of redemption or emotional “completion”. That makes Anna sort of a bleak portrait, but also one which feels authentic and true. And because Akerman’s formal rigor is so uncompromising, the film never dips into self-pity or sentimentality of any kind.
Cronk: That conversation with her mother reminds me of something that I noticed as I re-watched the film recently: Anna barely speaks in this film. There is, however, a lot of dialogue—probably the most in any Akerman film from the era—almost all spoken by the various people Anna comes in contact with throughout her tour. She meets various men who talk and talk but don’t really say anything all that interesting—or, at least, nothing she finds terribly interesting. The train scene I referenced earlier is almost entirely made up of a long monologue delivered by a stranger. Only when Anna meets up with an ex-lover who falls unexpectedly ill does she open up enough for the audience to learn a little more about her—and this is at the very end of the film. It makes one ever curious as to how Anna ended up in the state she’s in and which she remains as the film closes on a—as you say—despondent note. Which is to say this is incredibly mature storytelling, particularly for a woman who was only 28 years old when this film was released.
It’s interesting to note that the characters she was drawing in the mid-‘70s were all women in their forties. I can’t think of many comparable constructions in modern cinema. Her perspective was keen even at an early age and the divide adds a kind of retrospective resonance as Akerman was soon to leave behind traditional narrative, focusing less on character and more on landscape and the tactile qualities of environment. This has lent her subsequent returns to narrative with La captive and Almayer’s Folly a greater sense of possibility, and the emotion present in each feels like a now older filmmaker reconciling her various preoccupations, expanding her once flat-lined outlook in the process.
Marsh: Yes, and even in this film, where the protagonist is pretty obviously Akerman’s analog (“Anne” is Akerman’s middle name, by the way), the subject is approached in such a nuanced and deeply considered manner that it’s hard to believe it was the product of someone so young. Precocious young filmmakers aren’t unheard of across cinematic history, of course, but the early films of people Akerman’s age tend to be quite different in sensibility and style even if they’re alike in calibre—most of the prominent examples, from Orson Welles and Citizen Kane to Jean-Luc Godard and Breathless, and even right up to someone like Paul Thomas Anderson and Boogie Nights, are marked by an obvious youthfulness and vitality, which might account for why their films still feel so fresh and kinetic today.
Akerman’s early films, on the other hand, are exceptional for their formal and thematic sophistication, and in general for being the kind of serious, audacious experiments of someone significantly older and more experienced. Making an important or even just “great” film at such a young age is an achievement worth celebrating, yes, but producing difficult, challenging works of art like Jeanne Dielman and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna in your mid-20s is frankly astounding.
Which, as you’ve mentioned, is especially interesting in light of her recent work. Akerman is still only a little over 60 years old, and it looks like she’s now entering a new creative phase—like one of her most important inspirations, Jean-Luc Godard, she’s producing work that’s just as interesting in her late period as she ever did in her early ones, and I hope she’s got another decade or more of masterworks.
Cronk: I think she’s stayed interesting for the same reason that someone like Godard has stayed interesting: she’s continued to grow and develop her craft even as it debuted in such seemingly perfect form. Like we’ve said, Akerman has gone onto make a quasi-musical, documentaries, and most recently, literary adaptations, but just like those filmmakers you mentioned, there’s no mistaking her work for anyone else. The ‘70s was certainly her most consistently fruitful period—in fact, she may be the key filmmaker of that era—and as such, Les rendez-vous d’Anna stands as an important reconciliation of all her experimentation up to that point. You can see traces of this style in everyone from Jim Jarmusch to Carlos Reygadas to Pedro Costa, and it’s worth arguing for Akerman as one of the most influential filmmakers to ever come out of Europe, leaving her mark on everything from the New York underground to the European arthouse. And yes, there’s no reason to believe this conversation is anywhere near completion, as she continues to cover new ground with each successive outing.
Marsh: I think you’re right that Akerman’s a major figure and an important influence on many, but few people would adhere to the aesthetic framework she established throughout the 70s as rigidly as these films did. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna pushes boundaries exactly because Akerman pushes the film so far in one direction: she holds takes much longer than a less confident filmmaker might have, allows characters to speak for extended periods, and frames everything in the same measured, strikingly minimal way. The basic style of this film is the standard arthouse practice today, which you can see just by looking at recent festival highlights—Julia Leigh’s debut Sleeping Beauty comes to mind, but even something like Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia contains noticable traces of this spareness and asceticism—but in 1978 it was unheard of to approach a narrative feature with this kind of rigid, experimental formalism.
Akerman was taking cues from artists like Michael Snow, whose film experiments she’d become acquainted with while living in New York, and was marrying those techniques to the emotional and thematic core of a routine character study—which, along with the experiments Godard was working on with video during the same period, helped contribute to a new kind of experimental narrative cinema that would eventually dominate the arthouse landscape. Akerman really is one of the most major artistic figures in recent cinematic history, and I hope the canon remembers that.
