the audience applauded

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This is a depleted, feminist critique, an outsider's view, of society from a lesbian director. It is, in its way, a modern, update of Madame Bovary. The director, Chantal Akerman, was a lesbian who married another lesbian, long before identity politics legitimized homosexual marriage. Conventional social relations, esp. heterosexual relations, are poisoned and diseased. People are disconnected.The movie consists of a series of encounters, of conversations. In the first, Anna, the protagonist (Aurore Clement), kicks a blonde, square-jawed German man, out of her bed because she says, she doesn't love him. He lives in a dreary grey house in a dreary industrial neighborhood with his mother and 5 year-old daughter. His wife, a fellow German, ran away with her passionate lover, a non-Aryan Turk, and never even visits her daughter, thus rejecting marriage, motherhood and German nationality.A stranger on a train and Anna have a endless, listless conversation, which is decidedly moribund and only vaguely, weakly flirtatious. He is aimlessly wandering the earth, on his way to Paris, like Anna. A dreary landscape rolls on and on outside the train window beside them.Anna travels extensively, showing her films, and takes men into her bed from sheer loneliness. The only satisfying sex and relief from loneliness she has had, however, was with another woman (a lesbianism recalling the director's) - is this the person in Italy she tries to, but can't reach, by phone throughout the film, as in the first shot? In another conversation, she is uninterested in marrying a man when pressured to do so by his mother, who complains that her own marriage has failed, even as she and her husband have realized their ambitions and become wealthy. This woman has also lost one of her sons, who moved far away to America to become a successful academic. Again, family & marriage don't work in modern society. (The exposition of this film is less than optimal in that it isn't clear who this woman is and what is her exact relationship to Anna.)Anna travels constantly, pursuing her career (possibly an autobiographical detail from Akerman's own life). A boyfriend left her because she was always gone and he was always waiting for her. She is thus an independent woman who can't be tied down or domesticated, but is isolated by her career and success.In an unusual but offhand gesture, Anna slips naked into bed with her own mother, who is clothed. This is asexual and purely affectionate. Her nakedness is thus stripped of sexuality, made, instead, into the intimacy of a daughter with her mother, the only human warmth in the movie.Her present boyfriend (her last encounter) avows he loves her, but, too, suffers her absences. Anna brings him off by hand while he's driving: mechanical, impersonal sex. In a modern hotel room, with a blank TV screen blinking in the corner, we learn that he's world-weary and asthenic, and that he wishes he were a woman, so he could retire to the countryside to give birth to and raise a child. He is an ill, tired man, sick of his life and career, of his social role as a successful, working male. The movie ends with Anna in the dark, alone in bed, alone in her apartment, repeatedly pressing the buttons of her answering machine, listening to the detached voices of callers. Her social contacts are distant and reduced to the mechanical, like everything else.Anna is without makeup or adornment (recalling that Clement, as a model, wore no makeup). She eschews feminine wiles. Her face is almost always devoid of expression. She smiles only once in the movie.At one point Anna stares miserably into the camera, with tears in her eyes. This is the burden a modern woman must bear. This movie is her manifesto.Colors are all grey and flat earth tones. The movie takes place in winter. Objects of interest are put dead center in the frame, a static, leaden aesthetic. Shots are held for a long time, further deadening the movie. It, too, is moribund, a moribund view of a moribund world.PS. This movie has left an aftermath. I think of it, feel it inside, days after. It has definitely left a grey mist, a cloud. It's outside, frank vision of sexuality and unhappiness has somehow excused the same in my "soul," relieving me of the tension and anxiety of suppressing it. The movie is a "bring down," yes, a dreary, sad view of life, a bitter pill to swallow, but it is truth and freeing, as art is.

Amazingly shot, with the film always demonstrating a tremendous, disciplined use of image to convey mood and story. The film is full of long takes using striking symmetry; the camera is always finding frames within frames. For me, the story itself is interesting intellectually, but does lack emotional power; traveling to a film festival, a young femme filmmaker has a series of sadly empty encounters with people, leading to long, well-written monologues by the various lost souls. Sometimes too on the nose and speechy with its ideas, but always intelligent, physically beautiful film-making. For those with patience and an interest in image as well as story.

"Les Rendez-vous d'Anna" is the only film of Chantal Akerman's which I've seen. It is seemingly a highly personal film about a few days in the life of a female Belgian filmmaker who is traveling around Europe showing her latest work. There are long shots of traveling, whether by train, car or taxi, during which...well,nothing really happens. Kind of like real life. The Europe which is observed all looks the same, pretty much - sterile and dispiriting, rather like the Anna's life. Hardly a tree is seen in the whole movie and Anna actually tells her German lover that she doesn't much care for flowers - nature seems to have been blotted out. She has encounters on her travels with a sensitive, handsome German whom she rejects, a long-time friend of her mother's who wants Anna to settle down and marry her son, a German man who has travelled the world and is now decided on living in France which he declares the land of freedom, her mother in Brussels and her Parisian lover. Through all the encounters, Anna remains detached and pretty much a blank slate. She doesn't really seem to know what she is looking for, but it doesn't seem to be commitment of any kind. Clement is purposefully reserved and detached in the lead role, but the people she meets offer opportunities for several sharp well-turned performances, namely from Magali Noel, Lea Massari and Hans Zischler who is great as the rootless traveler searching for "freedom". "Anna" is an interesting, moody film but definitely not for those looking for action or entertainment. If that is your thing, avoid this film like the plague - but if you are a patient viewer who likes to be immersed in a mood and read between the lines, so to speak, this film may appeal to you.

Les Rendezvous d'Anna opens with a shot of a train station somewhere in Germany. A woman gets off the train, and she is seen walking slowly to a phone booth, and making a call. The shot is a long one, and the woman is so far in the distance that she can barely be seen at all. This shot establishes the mood of much of the film. I have to admit that, during the first half-hour of this two-hour-plus film, I almost ejected the videocassette and gave up on it. There are many long shots of Anna with her back to the camera, standing and looking out of hotel windows, train windows, at landscapes which are at best industrial. The viewer is tempted to say "OK, I get it; get on with it!" I succumbed to that temptation more than once. If you're willing, though, as I was, to slow down, to settle in to the pace of the film, to stop expecting anything much to happen, there are many rewards for your patience here. Anna is an independent filmmaker; she's on a more-or-less continuous tour of cities to appear at cinemas with her film in an attempt to attract a larger audience. The setting of Chantal Ackerman's film is almost entirely commercial interiors: on trains, in stations, in hotels and hotel rooms. I suspect much of this mirrors Ms. Ackerman's own experience. My first response while watching was to put this film in the same category as 'Last Year at Marienbad,' or 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' great films, but bleak films. 'Anna' is a bit of a different story, though--the situation is a temporary one; Anna is a creative person out to help sell her work, not simply a symbol for existential angst. Her surroundings are bleak, but she's making sense of it as she can; during the scenes in this film where she interacts with others (two men who don't quite make it as lovers, an older woman, her estranged mother) she comes alive. She listens to people, she talks to them, she's sympathetic; she helps them as much as she can, living in a rootless world. I came away from 'Anna' with a deep sense of involvement with the character; she's still on my mind two days later. Like Anna, I sometimes feel adrift in an alien urban landscape. If you're a lover of European art film, I can recommend this film without reservation.