Weasel WatchesWordsWatchesWords

1. The titular character, a 40ish(?) widow, puts potatoes on the stove to boil.
2. She greets a gentleman caller; they go into her bedroom. The door closes.
3. They emerge; he gives her money and leaves.
4. She takes a bath.
5. She cleans the tub.
6. She makes her bed.
7. She drains the potatoes, and brings in other pots from outside (presumably cooked earlier), and puts them on the stove to heat.
8. She sets the table, with a tablecloth and fancy napkins and everything.
9. Her (high-school aged, in context, although he looks 30ish) son arrives home.
10. She serves the soup course for the two of them; they eat soup.
11. She clears the soup bowls, and then serves a meat and potatoes course.
12. They eat the meat and potatoes.
13. She clears the dishes.
14. She folds up the napkins and puts them in their rings, then folds the tablecloth and puts it away.
15. She takes out a letter that arrived from her sister, and reads it to her son (it is about the aunt’s life in Canada, and how the sister hopes Jeanne will find a new husband someday), then puts it back in her purse.
16. She helps her son with his homework (memorizing and reciting a Baudelaire poem).
17. She puts on the radio, playing classical music, and knits part of a sweater.
18. She and her son take out the garbage, and walk around the block.
19. Upon getting back, they move around the living room furniture so there’s room to unfold the sofa (where he sleeps, as it’s a small apartment).
20. She turns off the gas heater and lights, and puts her son to bed.
21. She brushes out her hair in her bedroom (wearing a housecoat).
22. She goes to sleep.
23. She wakes up, and puts her housecoat back on over her nightie.
24. She washes her face.
25. She turns the heat back on.
26. She polishes her son’s shoes.
27. She makes coffee (pourover!) and drinks a cup.

Annnnnd… first hour over! And all I can think is: Haha, wow, that is either a) the least necessary, or b) the most accurate, “mature audiences” warning ever.

And so okay, the elephant in the room: The above probably sounds phenomenally boring. Yeah, it does, but somehow… it isn’t. Part of it is the starkness of the movie; it’s formally realist to a remarkable degree: There are almost never cuts away in the middle of an activity, so when you see her do some chore, you see her start it and perform it to the end. There’s no musical soundtrack, and there’s so little dialogue (her son barely speaks to her; her callers say almost nothing) that the movie takes place in a spare soundscape of only incidental sounds — the whistle of a teakettle, the clank of a spoon against a bowl. It actually put me in mind of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished last novel, because it genuinely transcends boredom and becomes something hypnotic.

The movie covers three days over the course of its three and a half hours; the second day is nearly a repeat of the first — the same chores, another gentleman caller… except that some time in the afternoon, things start getting a bit off. Like, at one point she doesn’t replace a lid on a jar, and it’s just a jolt. Something is wrong.

And when she overcooks the potatoes, I am not shitting you, it is a tense and jangling scene, made even more so because she’s out of potatoes and has to go to the store to buy more; by the time she’s peeling those potatoes, the movie feels deeply unsettled.

The next morning, she misses doing up a button on her housecoat, which is again immediately jarring; she also starts the day too early and throws off her whole schedule. And then, when her gentleman caller comes, we stay inside the bedroom for the first time to see the world’s dullest sex scene (I thought he’d fallen asleep on top of her at one point), after which she stabs him with a scissors and kills him, in a way that is both shocking and out of nowhere while also being the inevitable conclusion to everything we’ve seen. The movie then shows her sitting silently at the kitchen table, blood still on her hands and shirt, for five minutes before ending.