The Cinematheque

“This is a complex, exquisitely composed work on the elusive natures of identity and happiness …Les rendez-vous d’Anna registers today as a kind of precursor to the urban films of Tsai Ming-liang.”

Michael Koresky, Film Comment

A forlorn portrait of an Akerman-like artist’s estrangement from the world and others, Les rendez-vous d’Anna is the director’s extraordinary fiction follow-up to Jeanne Dielman and one of great works of the 1970s. Aurore Clément stars as Anna Silver, a Belgian director living out of a suitcase as she travels Europe promoting her new film. In a succession of transient spaces—hotel rooms, train cars, railroad stations—brief encounters transpire between Anna and individuals afflicted by a loneliness that seems rooted in her own incurable ennui. Akerman reifies the existential in every exacting tracking shot and symmetrical composition, externalizing a glacial inner-self wrestling with sexual identity, numbing isolation, and ineffaceable echoes of WWII. Anna’s mother (Lea Massari) offers the only respite of real intimacy, however fleeting. Upon release, the film was deemed a failure on ideological grounds, the feminist credo of Jeanne Dielman supposedly corrupted by the mostly male crew of Anna.

In French with English subtitles

“One of the great films about loneliness.”

Gus Edgar-Chan, Little White Lies

“A true bearing is sustained by the luminous, painterly miracle of wonderful image-making … A profound work of art that finds Akerman exploring a new, seemingly Bressonian idiom, that plumbs the well’s depth.”

Joanna Hogg & Adam Roberts, Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook