The Cinematheque

“The rare experience of a subjective woman’s cine-looking combined with realist representations of bodies, nudity, and sex; a unique encounter to have in a cinema, even today. Je tu il elle is human, grounded, confident, carnal—Akerman’s talent and assurance, both on and off screen, was, and is, inspiring.”

Margaret Salmon, Frieze

The first narrative feature by Chantal Akerman is a provocative, acutely personal meditation on the need for human contact, and a formative aesthetic precursor to her triumph Jeanne Dielman, released the following year. Structured in three movements, the film (co-written with semiologist Eric de Kuyper) commences with the protagonist/​narrator alone in a cramped apartment, rearranging furniture, removing her clothes, writing then discarding a letter, eating spoonfuls of sugar. Disillusioned with her isolation, she hitches a ride with a truck driver and passively, perfunctorily, satisfies his sexual urges. Finally, she visits a former girlfriend; they share a meal and, in a remarkably uninhibited ten-minute sequence, make love. While the film’s austere minimalism renders its examination of loneliness and desire nearly clinical, the intimate nature of the material is suggested by the personal pronouns of the title (I, you, he, she)—and by the participation of Akerman herself in the lead role.

In French with English subtitles

“Every bit as obsessive and as eerie as Akerman’s later Jeanne Dielman and Toute une nuit … Both potent and haunting.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“Chantal Akerman. When she ate a bowl of sugar in Je tu il elle, I was hers.”

James Benning