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First released in 1975, Chantal Akerman's jaw-dropping masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has since been voted the greatest film of all time; she followed it up with an avant-garde documentary, News from Home, before returning to narrative film with 1978's De Afspraken van Anna. Variously known as Les Rendez-vous d'Anna and The Meetings of Anna, this introspective and contemplative film wasn't well received upon its initial release, but the decade since her death has seen much, if not all, of Akerman's work reappraised—hence Jeanne Dielman's meteoric rise in critical popularity—and De Afspraken van Anna has recently been restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek.
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De Afspraken van Anna is an exploration of loneliness, disconnection and the search for meaning in a transient world. The film focuses on, yep, Anna (Aurore Clément), a Belgian filmmaker and proxy for Akerman, as she treks across Europe to promote her latest movie. The narrative structure is episodic, with Anna meeting various people over the course of her endless train journeys, including friends, strangers, lovers and relatives; each encounter reveals a different facet of Anna's interior life, but her sense of isolation remains constant. These lengthy conversations are often marked by a lack of emotional connection—at least on Anna's part—reflecting the title character's own detachment from the world around her.
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The film's pacing is glacial, which does allow the viewer to immerse themselves in Anna's world and experience her ennui. A real strength of the movie—one it shares with Jeanne Dielman—is its ability to capture the quotidian and transform it into something profound and meaningful. Anna's existence is one of rootlessness and impermanence—quite the opposite of that of Jeanne Dielman, who is more or less confined to her Brussels apartment. But despite the itinerant Anna's ostensibly glamourous jaunts on the film festival circuit, which are far removed from Jeanne's stultifyingly repetitive domestic chores, Anna has somehow reduced her own life to a level of mundanity that sits on a par with Jeanne's.
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Yet De Afspraken van Anna contains nothing in the vein of Jeanne Dielman's shocking dénouement, and the film ends much like it begins. Akerman's direction is characterised by long, static takes and a minimalist style, which create a sense of stillness, and the film's mise-en-scène is both beautiful and disciplined—qualities which are much more apparent in this newly restored print. Clément has to carry the entirety of the film, and her Anna is something of a blank canvas, a cipher who seems as interchangeable as the hotels and train stations she pinballs around. By turns fascinating and exhausting, this austere semi-autobiographical work has taken on an added poignancy since its maker's untimely death.
