So this is the first movie by Chantal Akerman, whom you will remember as the director of Jeanne Dielman. This one is less of a coherent story than that later movie, but it definitely shares some DNA.

This is most notable in the first third of the movie, wherein a woman (Akerman herself, doing that writer-director-actor thing) is in a room, spending time aimlessly. She moves furniture around. She stands up and lays down. She writes and rewrites a letter. She eats sugar out of a bag with a spoon. She takes her clothes off, and puts them back on, and then takes them off again. She spills the bag of sugar.

This is all accompanied by a perfectly calm first-person narration (which is often not synced up to what’s actually happening on the screen, which is a little weirdly discordant; it’s always unclear at first if the narrator is supposed to be untrustworthy until the described actions occur) describing what she’s doing, and giving it a timeline of days.

And then, after a half hour of this… she leaves the room. Just gets up and walks out. Which is kind of mind-blowing, because she felt trapped or imprisoned, but nope.

The second third of the movie is her hitching a ride with a trucker. They eat at various truck stops, in dead silence. Later, she gives him a handjob (offscreen, but he monologues during it). He then has a whole monologue about his marriage and how he is too tired to bang his wife anymore, and how his brother makes a lot of money, and how he picks up girls on the road and sleeps with them if they want to. She doesn’t speak for the entirety of this third of the movie.

And then we come to the final third, where she goes to a woman’s apartment; the woman is all like, you have to leave… but okay you can leave tomorrow. And then they have a medium-explicit lesbian sex scene that goes on for 10 minutes. The next morning, she leaves. The end.

On the one hand, this isn’t really a movie that tells a story. There’s no beginning, middle, and end here. But on the other hand, it’s not just a bunch of impressionistic surrealist dream-world nonsense, either. There is a story here, it just… happens largely outside of the scope of the movie. This is all middle. Did she just get dumped before the movie starts? Maybe! By that woman? Maybe! This could be a movie about handling a breakup in a variety of (mostly bad) ways. Or maybe it’s something else. It’s kinda not the point, you know?

Anyway, on the whole, this is kind of a first movie; Akerman takes the skills and artistic sensibilities she displays in this movie and puts together a much more complete, polished (though hardly conventional) movie in Jeanne Dielman. But as a first movie goes, it’s got style and mood — if not story — coming out its ears.