‘Family Business’: Chantal Akerman tries comedy
When Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, clinched the top spot in last year’s BFI Sight and Sound poll, it indicated a significant shift in the cultural sensibilities of the world of cinema. One of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema, Chantal Akerman made several powerful masterpieces over the course of her illustrious career, and any one of them would have been equally deserving of the title.
Often regarded as a pioneer of feminist cinema, Akerman’s visual style highlights the mundane aspects of the human condition – a domain that is regularly neglected by the cinema of the spectacle. Focusing on complex subjects such as violence, trauma, depression, shame and sexuality, Akerman’s films work within a highly specific aesthetic framework that is unique to her. Inspired by the originality of experimental pioneers such as Stan Brakhage, she ended up creating her own form of cinematic expression.
While Akerman’s depressingly bleak works are the ones that receive the most attention, the Belgian filmmaker also ventured into comedy. She directed the 1986 musical comedy Golden Eighties, but even before that, Akerman made a short titled Family Business in 1984, where she starred as a broke filmmaker. Funding was a huge problem for many notable European filmmakers who found themselves wanting to migrate to Hollywood for the money, and Akerman was no exception.
However, Akerman’s trip to Hollywood was much better than the compromises other directors ended up making. Family Business features Akerman as a fictionalised version of herself who tries to find her rich uncle in the labyrinthine city of Los Angeles, unable to make sense of the landscape of Hollywood. Although she sets out to ask her uncle for money for a new film, Akerman finds herself working as a Spoken English coach for her beloved collaborator Aurore Clément.
Clément’s most famous collaboration with Akerman is the brilliant 1978 gem Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, where Clément is simply fantastic as a depressed filmmaker whose loneliness is painfully unbearable. Here, she is just hilarious – perfectly complementing Akerman’s comedic style, which focuses on a simple poop joke for about a minute.
The director always believed that she would have been a huge success if she had worked in comedy. Akerman once said: “If I made comedies one after another, I would manage one day to sell tickets. I’m comic. I told you so. Comic-sad. At arm’s length, until it gets on my nerves. I carry a project at arm’s length until it gets on my nerves. Then, when the project is finished, silence reigns in the bedroom again.”
Influenced by the physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati, Family Business is an unexpected treat from Akerman. Watch the film below.
