The last time filmmaker Chantal Akerman appears in "No Home Movie," she's tying her shoelaces. Seated on a bed in a dark, sparsely furnished room with a single window, she doesn't say anything. She just ties her shoes, draws the curtains and exits, letting the shot linger on the empty room.
Her mother, Natalia, has been failing, and Akerman's melancholy hangs over the scene. The first time I watched it, her heavy silence was painful to see; the second time, watching had turned into raw feeling because Akerman is now gone.
Akerman died in October, apparently a suicide, at 65. One of the most influential filmmakers of the past several decades, she leaves behind two-dozen features, including "No Home Movie."
Movie Review
'No Home Movie,' a documentary written and directed by Chantal Akerman. 105 minutes. Not rated; for mature audiences. In French, with English subtitles. SIFF Film Center.
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Her death makes the film even more of a memento mori than perhaps it might have seemed when she finished it, given her mother's impending death. Yet this makes the movie sound far too bleak, especially in light of the love — the love Akerman has for her mother, who returns it in kind — that suffuses it.
The first image in "No Home Movie" is of a tree in a desert. It's an old tree by the looks of the spindly, half-bare branches shuddering violently in the wind. How, you wonder, does it survive?
Much of the rest of this two-hour movie takes place in Natalia Akerman's pin-neat, middle-class apartment in Brussels. Akerman simply records her mother in this apartment, fuss-budgeting about while murmuring to herself or talking to visitors.
The conversations between mother and daughter span the continuum from light to dark, present to past, from the young Chantal's untied shoelaces to the Holocaust. Sometimes mother and daughter talk via Skype.
These Skype talks charm you with sweet declarations ("kisses") and some gentle comedy (Akerman's "Maman" is a bit technologically challenged), although mostly with their unguarded intimacy.
In time, though, her mother grows increasingly frail.
Midway through "No Home Movie," Akerman cuts to a succession of traveling shots of a desert. They cleave the movie in two. There's no overt explanation for them. Again, as she does with the image of the tree, Akerman lets you read the image for yourself, even as she has also carefully laid out the movie's meaning in every previous edit, shot and word, including her mother's remembrances of the family's history, about keeping kosher, about the flight from Poland, the Nazis and the war.
If you let it, "No Home Movie" invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling. It's filled with Akerman's signatures, like images of doorways, halls and obliquely shot rooms, which can make her seem like a spy in her mother's house. This is not, as the title reminds you, a home movie in the usual sense, and yet it is.
References
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