The movie Adam McKay called “20 Hitchcock films rolled into one”
In recent years, Adam McKay has managed to bring scathing political satire back into the mainstream. His 2021 apocalyptic comedy Don’t Look Up used the analogy of an extinction-level meteorite strike to examine our unwillingness to confront the climate crisis head-on. More recently, he attacked the pettiness of the super-rich in The Menu, which stars Ralph Fiennes as a world-class chef who sets up a unique and increasingly murderous dining experience for a gaggle of moneyed foodies. Here, the director discusses one of the most revered films of the 1970s
Adam McKay began his career in the 1990s, soon landing a job as head writer for Saturday Night Live. Over two seasons, he honed his craft, applying his skills to comedy feature films like 2004’s Anchorman, 2006’s Talladega Nights, and 2010’s The Other Guys. In the mid-2010s, he side-stepped into drama, releasing The Big Short, a film about investigations into the increasingly unstable 2000s housing bubble. The 2015 picture won him a slew of awards nominations, including two BAFTAS.
He continued to explore US political and financial systems in 2018’s Vice, starting work on 2021’s Don’t Look Up in 2019. Few films have galvanised so many so effectively. By analysing the climate crisis from a faintly fantastical perspective, McKay made the issue genuinely digestible for huge numbers of people who would otherwise have continued burying their heads in the sand. That’s no small feat.
Following the release of The Menu in 2022, McKay was interviewed by Sight and Sound for their final issue of the year. During that conversation, he discussed his affection for Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which was recently named “the greatest film of all time” by the BFI. “Almost every emotion lives underneath the dialogue and routines,” he told Sight and Sound, “And when they finally reveal themselves, the ending is like 20 Hitchcock films rolled into one.”
Released in 1975, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is a powerfully unsettling look at one housewife’s mundane and cloistered existence through a series of long takes that gradually bring a terrible secret light. An investigation into startling contemporary issues concerning motherhood, gender roles, and the surface-level respectability of the bourgeois, Akerman’s masterpiece juxtaposes the banality of everyday life with moments of transcendent euphoria and epiphany. Indeed, throughout this three-hour anti-epic, the director excavates the daily lives of her characters, slowly unearthing the poetry behind their routines.
You can watch the trailer for this incredibly rich and rewarding film below.
