a way out
by
Douglas Messerli
Chantal
Ackerman Les Rendez-vous d’Anna /
1978
I
might now finally, after all of these years, confess that every time I see a
new movie, play, or performance, I become somewhat nervous: I long for each
writer, actor, and filmmaker to be just perfect, that I might find in the art a
sort of personal transformation and, at the very least, allow me a life-long
admiration of the work. I am nervous, not for my own possible disdain and even
disliking of the work, but in the way if I might myself be the actor, the
writer, the filmmaker. Will the audience 
see what I am trying to do, or what
the movie or the play is attempting to express. I guess you might describe me
as an over-empathetic viewer, which may be why I often find meaning where
others simply point to the flaws.
There are a number of exceptions to this
rule, however, in film Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Ingmar
Bergman, Jean Renoir, Yasujirō Ozu —although I have
written a few negative reviews of each of these masters—and now Chantal
Akerman, all of whom make me immediately feel comfortable in their art, so much
so that I can simply sit back and enjoy without any of my self-created
discomfort.
Les Rendez-vous
d’Anna, Akerman’s 1978 film, despites its somewhat dour themes,
accordingly, was a film which immediately engaged me and allowed me just to sit
back in my office-desk chair and enjoy its pleasures.
That seems like a strange thing to say
about a somewhat autobiographical film which, in parts, explain the Belgian
director’s own suicide in 2015. The central character, traveling throughout
Europe in this work, Anna Silver (Aurore Clément) meets en route from Essen to
Brussels, is like Ackerman a film director, a beautiful woman in great demand.
Yet she chooses inexpensive hotels, trains filled with German immigrants, and
far-too-brief encounters with people she had relationships with along the way,
including the mother of a man she has turned down for marriage twice (Ackerman,
herself, was lesbian), and her own mother—brilliantly performed by Lea Massari,
the gone-missing young woman of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura—the perfect choice, perhaps, since Anna is herself a missing
woman, clearly unable to interact with any of the figures with whom she has her
“rendez-vous.”
As J. Hoberman notes: “Anna is a portrait
of a woman, actually a self-portrait…a 28-year-old filmmaker who is the
Belgian-born child of Holocaust survivors, [who] is a stand-in for Akerman,
traveling from one European city to another to introduce screenings of her
movie.”
Perhaps no other director has been so
willing to cinematically proclaim her own failures, recreating slightly
autobiographical portraits in I you she
he and the wonderful News from Home,
in which her mother’s impassioned correspondence plays a major role.
If Anna seems cold and dispassionate, we
can well relate to her disorientation in the post-World War II Germany and Belgium.
No one she meets seems to any longer be at home or even comprehend what “home”
might mean. They all speak an amalgam of languages, having learned their new
tongues just skillfully enough to be complimented on their fluidity. German,
French, Turkish, and numerous other tongues (we should recall that Ackerman’s
own country is a bilingual world of French and Dutch). There is no possibility,
one might argue, of being perfectly at home with ones own native tongue.
The Germany this film portrays, from
Essen through Cologne and elsewhere, is presented as an urban nightmare of
signs and passages, sending its citizens in the directions of their presumed
destinations. Anna’s arrival in Essen seemed, even to me who has never been
there, so familiar of the German landscape that I once might have visited the
city. The giant cathedral of Cologne is glimpsed only in the far distance. This
world might almost be the same (although obviously different) from a US journey
up the east coast on Amtrak.
The past and present in this film is
glimpsed only in quick images, a tie some male guest has left in the room where
Anna has ensconced herself; in a train full of “outsiders,” which might almost
resemble one of Donald Trump’s racist nightmares; a German who complains that
his wife has “run off” with a man from Turkey, as if the director were
signaling Fassbinder’s film of 4 years earlier, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
This is, after all, a world of fear, a
woman whose family died in the Holocaust, freely traveling through the very
territory which sent them to their deaths, not only Germany, but Belgium
itself. Anna’s world is not only one of repressed memories, but of missed
telephone calls, where the only possible communication is through missed messages
on answering machines—a world in which even the most beloved figures are always
out to lunch. It is a bleak world not for the tourists, a post-war landscape
where only those who have been born into it cannot ever quite reconfirm their
existences. And, despite her beauty and talent, Anna cannot quite find her
place in it.
As I mentioned above, it helps to explain
why this so very gifted director, whose films seem so natural that I never fear
upon entering them, finally sought a way out.
Los Angeles, January
18, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (January
2019).
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