April Wheeler: The Newest Jeanne Dielman?
Two Movie Women, Past and Present, May Have Much in Common
What a coincidence. The same week Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is revived at New York’s Film Forum for a week in a brand-new 35mm print, moviegoers get a chance to see the latest example of submerged feminine desperation in Kate Winslet's portrayal of April Wheeler, the headstrong, restless wife in Revolutionary Road,. Sam Mendes’s adapted Richard Yates’s searing 1961 indictment of deadening suburbia and hopeless self-delusion. Their movies may be worlds apart aesthetically, but both of these characters and their situations, it turns out, have quite a bit to bind them together.
April Wheeler: Wordless Defiance
Strong-willed and steely, April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) is the latest in a trend of quietly suffering suburban heroines. A stage-actress-in-training when she meets her to-be husband Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) for the first time, she, at the beginning of the film, experiences a humiliating defeat in a failed community production. April and Frank end up arguing heatedly on the side of a highway that night, and they maintain that buried hostility…until, a few days later, she hits upon a radical idea: moving the whole family to Paris.
April says to Frank that she is willing to do whatever it takes for Frank to discover his ambition in life. One suspects, however, that her real motive for such a daring move is far simpler: just to break out of her suburban ennui and shake up both their lives. According to the film’s vision of 1950s suburbia, however, societal rules of patriarchy and family life eventually will condemn any wannabe free spirit to sticking to their lives of “hopeless emptiness.” Either you stick to those rules wholeheartedly; stick to them with seething inner resentment; or risk being cut off from “normal” society, as one character (played by Oscar-nominated Michael Shannon) is forced to do by his unsympathetic parents.
April Wheeler becomes the latest victim, realizing that her husband fits more into the suburban mold than even he may realize. There’s not much left for her to do, then, except commit a violent and fatal act of wordless defiance, the reasoning of which only she could fully understand.
Jeanne Dielman: Creature of Slowly-Cracking Habit
The climax of Jeanne Dielman features an equally shocking act of violence, but its meaning, for us and for the character, is far more tantalizingly ambiguous.
But then, Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) herself is a thornier case than April Wheeler, at least in Revolutionary Road the movie. A widow living with her son in a Belgium apartment (the address of which is tellingly featured in the film's full title), Jeanne seems locked into her daily routine, which Chantal Akerman portrays in exacting detail over a three-day (or, in movie time, three-and-a-half-hour) span. Without clearly explaining why, she has become a creature of habit; even as she cooks, bathes and knits, her demeanor suggests duty rather than passionate engagement. Her son remains aloof even as she selflessly provides for him, and her life seems to revolve more around errands and favors rather than in any personal projects.
Between the featured second and third days, however, cracks in that routine start to show—a dropped sponge here, a dish carelessly left with soap bubbles there, and the like. These blips, however small on the surface, resound, thanks to Akerman’s rigorous formalism—using still cameras staring straight ahead into rooms and relying strictly on medium- and long shots to create a hypnotizing, trance-like effect—with the unnerving force of a world slowly going haywire.
Jeanne Dielman seems to be living her own life of quiet desperation, a desperate soul locked into a ritualistic existence. But what April Wheeler eventually expresses through explosive shouting matches and physical action, Jeanne expresses in subtler, quieter, yet no less physical ways.
Jeanne Dielman Versus Revolutionary Road
What makes Jeanne Dielman a more profound, more elusive, and ultimately more devastating experience than the rather conventional Revolutionary Road is Akerman’s refusal to present easy explanations for her predicament. If Sam Mendes predictably pins it all on the suburbs and on stifling social codes regarding marriage and family (less smugly than in his Oscar-winning American Beauty, granted, but no less sentimentally), Akerman, by focusing solely on this one character and only lightly hinting at a backstory, implies much more about the character and the world she lives in than she shows. Whatever larger causes may be at work, Jeanne, ultimately, isn’t so easy to pin down either.
At the end of the film, she is seen sitting on her dining-room table after a horrifying moment in a daze, and one can only guess what can be behind those almost relieved eyes. Whatever it is, it’s less an act of defiance, as in April Wheeler’s case, than it is a shocking act of personal release, devoid of any implicit heroic grandeur.
Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman
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Kate Winslet as April Wheeler
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