Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

It is difficult to know how to write about Jeanne Dielman, by Chantal Akerman. Even before it was voted “the greatest film of all time” in the most recent critics’ survey by Sight and Sound — the first time in 70 years that a film directed by a woman won the most votes — there was something predestined about Jeanne Dielman. In its own time, the film generated countless comments. They have accumulated on its surface like sediments at the bottom of a lake. As such, one rarely watches Jeanne Dielman without foreknowledge or expectations. It comes accompanied by the mythical circumstances of its production — a 25-year-old director, a mere 120,000 dollars provided by a state scholarship, a contradictory and controversial reception — and by the feminist interpretations of academics and critics over the decades (despite Akerman herself thinking the term suspect), which have helped cement the film’s reputation. Few films have been described so exhaustively, even in such general terms. Few films have been so important for so many people in such different ways.

So how can we talk about Jeanne Dielman? Perhaps by going back to the beginning, trying to imagine that first, relatively clear-eyed viewing. The stampede of audience members leaving the auditorium when the film was first shown at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight is well-known. We can still easily understand why. At three and a half hours, its implacable scrutiny of a woman’s domestic routine makes Jeanne Dielman an exercise in resistance, a war of attrition. It possesses a durational honesty bent on demanding effort from its audience, forcing us to experience the same monotonous and mechanical desperation as its protagonist. Above all, the film evokes a kind of nameless dread. A widowed mother cleans, cooks, eats with her child, and in the afternoon has sex with anonymous men in exchange for money. We follow her routine over three days via a series of long, relentless takes, until the shocking conclusion in the third.

A few forced conversations with her son reveal fragments of her past: a husband who read a lot, a childhood spent living with aunts. She tells her son that she married because she wanted her own life — and we are able to see that she has it. What is forgotten in so many descriptions of the film, and in the prevailing memories of its viewers (the scenes of making meatloaf, peeling potatoes, making coffee, what Ivone Margulies called the work’s “hyper-realist day-to-day”), are these strange interactions and the instant reactions, or lack thereof, of Jeanne Dielman to those interactions. “It’s not worth talking about these things,” Jeanne Dielman says to her son, when he starts to tell his mother what he knows about sex and that, as soon as he discovered what mothers and fathers do, he “hated Father for months” and “wanted to die”. The son’s monologue is full of psychoanalytical potential. The mother puts a stop to the conversation. Moments pregnant with Akerman’s typically baroque humour also seem to be forgotten in the collective memory of the film (this humour, which is so often alluded to in relation to other works by the director, seems to be ignored when discussing her serious “masterpiece”).

When Jeanne Dielman enters a neighbourhood café for the second time in the film, she realises that the place she usually sits in is occupied. She stops for an instant to stare at the usurper — an older woman reading the newspaper — and cranes her neck before sitting at the next table along, indifferent. This moment lasts for less than ten seconds of film, but it is a rare moment of interactive relief. Later there is the neighbour (played by Akerman herself, though we only hear her voice from behind her apartment door) who gives her baby to Jeanne Dielman to look after while she goes shopping. Jeanne Dielman places the cot on the dining table just like the sack of potatoes she bought a few scenes earlier. Yet however much we look for clues, almost nothing is revealed about Jeanne Dielman’s mental state. “I don’t want any psychologisation of the story,” Chantel Akerman said to Delphine Seyrig in Autour de Jeanne Dielman, a making-of documentary of “the greatest film of all time” that gives us, the armchair psychologists and politicisers searching for clues, something to dissect. Through this collective forgetfulness and a lack of coverage of these moments of humour and meaningful conversation, it seems that Akerman, one way or another, got what she wanted.