Rating: 4/5
It’s nice to watch the back and forth between Chantal Akermann and Delphine Seyrig, especially when Seyrig challenges a direction by asking for a reason why her character would do it — digging for the secrets that makes her tick. It becomes clearer that it was their collaboration that really made this movie something special
It’s also nice to see that even though Akermann is brilliant, she is still very much a 20-something, complete with the know-it-all dismissiveness that Seyrig — then in her 40s — knew how to patiently but intently interrogate
I can’t believe how much of the minutiae was in the script, to the point where Seyrig felt like a “pawn on a chessboard”, but it seems like she was able to work in bits of behavior
It seems like everyone was miserable the whole time making Jeanne Delmann! Akermann hated her crew because she didn’t choose them, Seyrig could barely tolerate Akermann’s direction — if the film did not center so much on one woman’s misery, it might have come out differently