Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we look at Chantal Akerman's final film, 'No Home Movie'.
If No Home Movie is any indication, then Chantal Akerman had a lot of creativity inside of her to offer at the time of her far too premature death at age 65. I have no doubt that this, her final film, will likely confound those who find their way to it out of mere curiosity, but – and this is true of many films by many filmmakers, but especially so here – No Home Movie is a film that will most definitely play as something far deeper and more personal to somebody who is more familiar with her back catalogue than somebody who isn’t.
I know that sometimes it sounds awfully pretentious to say that. Who can be expected to watch a filmmaker’s entire back catalogue? I nonetheless think that it is true that No Home Movie takes on added dimensions and weight if you have seen Akerman’s 1977 masterpiece News from Home, which was the audience’s first introduction to Natalia Akerman, the director’s mother. While she is neither seen nor heard in that earlier film – her first after the groundbreaking breakthrough Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – her written word is narrated to us over rolling and static images of New York City to help give a sense of the fractured mother-daughter relationship at its core. [More...]
While not a sequel to News from Home in any real shape or form, No Home Movie nonetheless returns to these themes of abandonment, loneliness, detachment, and familial angst. There’s never any doubt that this is the same mother and daughter whose relationship Chantal had so bravely conceded, not even allowing herself a defence in the face of her mother’s pleas for closeness. One of this most heartbreaking scenes of this new movie is when Natalia pointedly returns to these issues, telling her daughter in one of the many conversations the two share throughout that “she’s never really talked to me.” So what was already a project that echoed with the poignancy of a powerhouse filmmaker’s final work is enhanced even further by the cinematic history that fans of Akerman’s work will have with its central figure.
I should add that No Home Movie is not an aesthetic companion to News from Home (which has about two or three of the most breathtaking tracking shots I have ever seen on film). In fact, the only major issue I had with the film was that the digital aesthetic is rather garish and rendered many of its tableaus as grungy and unappealing. Manuel was quite prescient when he observed that the opening minutes of No Home Movie “feel like a dare” as a trademark Akerman static long-take observes a dry and brittle tree amid an arid landscape, surrounded by blustering, howling winds. It’s one of the more beautiful sequences in the film and is an oddly apt visual metaphor for Akerman’s entire career, deeply rooted as the winds of emotion swirl around her.
Akerman’s suicide lingers over the final product, without a doubt. If, as the title suggests, this film is no mere home movie, then we must question what exactly it is. Indeed, it’s something much more personal than just casually captured family time, the kind that we routinely see inserted into the documentaries of noteworthy people. It’s an effort by the youngest Akerman to reach out and say everything she’s wanted to say and do so the only way she knows how – through film. She spent her career observing the complexity of women’s lives through stillness, but for her last film she returned to the relationship that she first explored on screen 40 years ago. As a farewell, she found something beautiful.
Release: No Home Movie is on VOD and DVD from June 7.
Oscar: The documentary branch haven't touched any of Akerman's films, but a sentimental contingent could see her slide into the long-list. It's more experimental nature, however, makes anything more a longshot.