Every ten years, Sight & Sound announces the list of the greatest films ever made, and this little-known 1975 film just usurped "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo" in the #1 position. The Criterion Channel is showing it, so naturally I felt a desire to see this purported masterpiece. Directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, it runs a marathon 3 hours and 21 minutes and focuses on the mundane existence of a middle-aged single mother's daily routine over the course of three days. The wrinkle is that she is a prostitute in the afternoons while her teenaged son is at school. Delphine Seyrig plays the disaffected woman in a minimalist fashion until she starts to unravel in very subtle moments during the second half of the film. Yes, I watched the whole movie, and perhaps because I'm not an arthouse cineaste, I found it excruciating to watch the minutiae of this woman's carefully coordinated life and probably couldn't appreciate the quiet desperation she is undergoing. How this film came out of nowhere to top the S&S list will be fodder for debate among pretentious cinema snobs for the next decade. Personally I don't get it.
