Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978, Chantal Akerman) (Patreon)

51/100

Having now seen ten of Akerman's features, including a few more of the early ones (for ages there was a 20-year gap in my viewing, between Jeanne Dielman and A Couch in New York; a lot still remains for me to catch up with), I think I can confidently say that I appreciate her almost exclusively as a formalist. As I've noted before, it's the precision of both Delphine Seyrig's movements and Akerman's cutting from room to room that makes Jeanne Dielman riveting to me despite the absence of conventional drama for most of the film's three hours; that's cinema's most extreme example of character being defined by action rather than emotion, with the camera serving as an extension of Jeanne's clockwork routine. Similarly, Les Rendez-vous d'Anna—I'm using the French title, as that's how it was released in the U.S. (plus The Meetings of Anna sounds machine-translated)—boasts two moments that took my breath away, both of which involve horizontal motion from left to right. One is a shot that tracks alongside Anna as she walks down a hotel corridor, past rooms with open doors, through which we twice see a maid whip-crack (not really sure what le verbe juste would be) a bedsheet across the bed, in perfect synchronization with her passing. The other sees her walk along a train's crowded corridor, but this time the camera remains stationary and we follow her progress by cutting from the far (window) side of one fully occupied compartment to the next as she passes their doors (which are closer to being full-length windows themselves, i.e. not opaque). It's just exquisite filmmaking, and I have little doubt that I'd have loved, say, Les Voyages d'Anna, or some other movie that focused primarily on its protagonist traversing time and space. 

The movie we actually have, however, mostly constitutes a series of conversations—monologues, really, to which Anna impassively listens. That's not inherently a bad thing, except insofar as I've never found the dialogue in Akerman's films terribly interesting, and was less than enthralled by much of what's spoken here. That Anna's mother serves as the rule-proving exception probably isn't coincidental; while I'm uncertain just how autobiographical this film is (probably wouldn't have occurred to me were Anna's career as a director not repeatedly mentioned), the primacy of Akerman's real-life mother throughout her work suggests that the bed-sharing scene feels more personal and heartfelt because it is more personal and heartfelt. But I can't say that I gleaned much from Anna's other encounters, which at best seem expressly designed to slowly wilt her, like a flower in too-harsh sunlight. Sounds kind of interesting as I describe it, admittedly, but the actual experience of all that mundanity and dreariness merely proved enervating. Does that make it easy to identify with Anna in the film's final scene, as she lays on her bed barely summoning the strength to check her equally banal answering-machine messages? Sure, I suppose. But you could likewise make me empathize with a character who hates grad school by making me sit through lots of tedious lectures. (Paging Fred Wiseman!) Akerman had already, by this point, demonstrated a unique ability to convey psychological numbness via oddly thrilling formal gambits. Doing the same via periodic blathering—even if the verbiage is received rather than generated, and occasionally offset by intriguing detours like Anna's late-night trip to the pharmacy— seems like a step backward.