Akerman herself plays a lonely, isolated woman who takes off on a road trip, having sexual encounters with a truck driver who gives her a lift and, later, another woman, possibly an ex-lover. A mere recounting of the plot reveals little of the impact (startling and fascinating, baffling and frustrating) of this highly personal film, made when Akerman was only 23, having recently returned to Belgium after two years in New York City. The self-funded project already displays the cinematic techniques and concerns that would characterize the artist's career: long stationary shots, minimal exposition, an underlying sense of unexpressed anxiety and alienation, attention to the minutest details of everyday life in real-time (an approach that has been cited as an influence by such acclaimed contemporary filmmakers as Sophia Coppola, Kelly Reichardt and Gus Van Sant).
Critics and theorists - among them Queer film scholar B. Ruby Rich, who called it "a cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality" - have also claimed it as a first step in feminist cinema that would be taken to its height in Jeanne Dielman.... Akerman resisted prescriptive categorization of her work, once stating that "when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves." Her final film, No Home Movie (2015), is composed of conversations between her and her mother, an Auschwitz survivor with whom she remained close all her life. The older woman's inability and refusal to talk about her death camp experience apparently took an emotional toll on Akerman.
A year and a half after her mother's death in 2014, she died in Paris at the age of 65. News outlets reported that friends and relatives identified suicide as the cause. Je tu il Elle may not have achieved the greatness and impact of Jeanne Dielman..., but it's an essential starting point for viewing and appreciating the 40+ films Chantal Akerman left behind.
By Rob Nixon
