Les Rendez-Vous D'Anna (Meetings With Anna) (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
Film director Anna (Clément) travels by train with her new film, from Germany to Belgium to France. Consisting predominately of en route encounters with friends, family, lovers, and strangers, Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna is a series not of conversations but of flat, unnatural monologues recited at our withdrawn protagonist. Serial in structure, the progression of scenarios resists narrative utility, instead accumulating as an array of contexts for Anna to drift into and out of with nominal interest or involvement. Holding fixed medium-long perspectives, avoiding point-of-view shots, and favoring stagy blocking, Akerman's hyperrealist mise-en-scene is sanitized of photogenic ornament until numb. Lacking voice-overs or other shortcuts to Anna’s inner thoughts, no concessions are made for character interiority. This rigorous defamiliarization is perhaps the film's key element - cinema Akerman describes as "language itself, without parasites, without the possibility of identification." If such a cinema is as rich, complex, and effective as this, I'm all for it.
This capsule review appeared in The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide (Sasquatch Books, 2004).