One of Chantal Akerman’s Best Films Is in Legal Limbo

Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn’t themselves have come up with. The complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s work that runs at MOMA from September 11th to October 16th includes a superb instance of this phenomenon—of visionary production fostering directorial artistry—in her “Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels,” an hour-long movie from 1994.

“Portrait” was commissioned by the French television channel Arte as part of an anthology series titled “All the Boys and Girls of Their Age,” which featured the work of nine directors, including not only veterans such as Akerman, Claire Denis, and André Téchiné but also relative newcomers. The directors were given a handful of dictates. The films had to be about adolescents and had to be set some time from the nineteen-sixties to the eighties, with some political context. Each movie was to run an hour and to be shot on a low budget, on a tight schedule (about three weeks), and in the small-scale format of 16-mm. film. Finally, each film had to feature pop music and include a party scene. Aside from those conditions, the filmmakers were given more or less total freedom—and, in “Portrait,” that freedom shows.

Akerman is, of course, most known for the movie that was voted best of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” from 1975, which looks with choreographic precision at the domestic life—both utterly conventional and radically independent—of a middle-aged woman. With its calculatedly severe form, the film both distills and extends melodrama to avant-garde extremes. “Portrait,” despite sharing some crucial traits with that earlier work, is also drastically different. Thanks to its production method—for a start, the emphasis on youth—it’s one of Akerman’s most personal, immediately expressive, and dramatically straightforward movies. And “Portrait” is also one of Akerman’s rarest films—also because of the terms under which it was made—and its rarity has produced a skewed view of Akerman’s cinematic achievement.

“Portrait” is, in effect, a short story—one so simple and so solid that it invites adornment and elaboration on a grand scale of imagination. The film is set, pointedly, at a significant historical moment—April, 1968, just a month before the great wave of generational protests that transformed France—and at a similarly significant time in the life of its title character, Michèle (Circé Lethem). Michèle, whose age is unspecified (the actor was seventeen), engages in a rebellion of her own. While it’s still dark, her father drops her off at a streetcar stop for her commute to school, but she doesn’t take the streetcar and she doesn’t go to school. In a café, she starts to forge a parental note to excuse her absence (a nod to a scene from Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”) but then gives up and decides to stop going to school altogether, tearing up and throwing away her report card—her version of crossing the Rubicon.

At lunch hour, Michèle meets her friend Danielle (Joëlle Marlier) outside the school gate. They join two boys at a café and indifferently make out with them; then Danielle returns to school and Michèle goes to the movies. There, she meets a young man named Paul (Julien Rassam) who brazenly tries to pick her up, and she doesn’t mind. As they kiss, talk, and wander about, he mentions that he’s a deserter from the French Army and has just arrived in Brussels, with nowhere to stay. Michèle has an idea: an adult cousin lives nearby but is out of town; she takes Paul to the cousin’s apartment and they get into bed together. Michèle then leaves him there and meets up with Danielle to head over to a big party, where she has another idea: having concluded that Paul isn’t the man for her but for Danielle, she decides to do something about it.

The heart of the story involves a romantic epiphany that’s also an unspoken recognition of homosexual desire; Michèle’s matchmaking scheme is a vicarious replacement for something that’s doomed to go unfulfilled. The subtlety of Akerman’s concept and the wry tenderness of her approach are, however, merely a start. The extraordinary achievement of the drama is that it immediately and consistently fulfills the audacious triple dare of its title, being simultaneously about a character, a time, and a place. Michèle comes across as a singular and powerful personality, with something of Akerman’s own trenchant intellect, assertive candor, and vulnerable self-revelation. At the same time, the movie is a thrillingly airy and active vision of Brussels that maps Michèle’s precocious and ambitious temperament onto the cityscape. Moreover, the film is also a vision of a time pregnant with radical change, with Michèle’s dramatic leap off course foreshadowing the imminent crisis of the Francosphere. (This last is a theme of Akerman’s life, too. Born in 1950, she dropped out of high school and, in 1968, made her first film.)

“Portrait,” shot in the summer of 1993, is one of the great movies of walking and talking; the urban whirl is the turbulent setting for profuse dialogue, both dialectical and aphoristic. French-language cinema, especially of the New Wave and its successors, is rich in dialogue-driven dramas, but what marks the best of them, such as “Portrait,” is the distinctive way of performing dialogue that results from directors’ inventive collaborations with actors. Akerman manifestly delights in Lethem’s fluent yet unvarnished diction, in the awkward animation with which she endows Michèle’s urgent and precociously literary self-expression. Michèle—whose bluntness seems of a piece with her plain but striking clothes—speaks of a life that she hasn’t lived much of yet but that she experiences, in its ordinariness, with a dazzling intensity and a deep anguish. With touching ingenuousness, she confesses her pain by mentioning how she conceals it: “Anyway, the more I hurt the more I smile; I even sing; I get eccentric—skip, jump. . . . I can’t stop talking. I’m witty, I’m funny.” Michèle brings Paul to a bookstore and declares, “I do like books about incommunicability.” She quotes Kierkegaard at length, and later tells Paul, “Generally, when I don’t agree with people about Sartre, I stop talking to them.” She keeps journals, aspiring to be a writer—“If so, a great one.” She also talks about wishing at times to die and, after she asks Paul if he feels the same way, they fantasize, with blithe simplicity, about how they’d kill themselves.