Golden Eighties, Chantal Akerman

If you’re only familiar with the first decade of Chantal Akerman’s career—which culminated in her durational epic Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)—then you’re in for a shock with her consumer-culture musical Golden Eighties (1986). With its flamboyant pastel colour scheme, rapid editing style, and buoyant song-and-dance numbers, the film pivots away from the minimalist aesthetic that distinguishes her work in the seventies. Akerman had range and was eager to experiment with form and genre. Like the blatantly artificial musical melodramas of Jacques Demy, the film makes use of a small, contained setting (one wing of an underground shopping mall) and leverages these cramped quarters to shape its choreography and create charming symmetrical visuals. In the opening scene, the fixed camera is pointed at a tiled marble floor as people (seen only from the torso, down) walk across the frame at different angles—the lively music (by Marc Hérouet) and the rhythms of the walkers’ footsteps immediately announce the beginnings of a spare yet finely orchestrated spectacle.

Akerman, who wrote the music’s lyrics, called Golden Eighties an “ode to marriage,” which is, frankly, somewhat of a joke. Love and romance—the larger-than-life kind envisioned by Hollywood movie musicals from the fifties—are, in Akerman’s hands, incompatible with matrimony. Under the auspices of capitalism, the institution is a matter of (financial) safety and convenience. Robert (Nicolas Tronc)—the son of M. Schwartz (Charles Denner) and Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), the proprietors of a ready-to-wear shop—is hopelessly in love with Lili (Fanny Cotençon), the freewheeling manager of a beauty salon. Lili is supported by an aging gangster (Jean-François Balmer) and has no intention of leaving him for Robert, though she enjoys canoodling with the younger man at her leisure and urges him to take their relationship casually. In a foolish attempt to make Lili jealous, Robert proposes to the shy and conscientious Mado, fulfilling her dreams and securing the approval of his parents, who view marriage as a practical undertaking; a means of settling down and creating domestic stability.

Akerman draws a stark generational contrast between Robert’s pragmatic parents and the younger characters, products of the decade’s ethos of individualism. But as reflected in the spaces they frequent—the Schwartz’ clothing store and Lili’s beauty salon—self-expression and personal identity is sculpted by consumer choices. Akerman flits back and forth between different characters as they contend with their unique romantic problems, playing their idealistic sentiments against a Greek chorus of skeptics and cynics: a group of crooning mallrats in oversized suits and the gossiping salon girls. Sylvie (Myriam Boyer), a barista, believes she’ll soon be whisked away to North America by her unseen boyfriend, though it soon becomes clear that her beau will never return and that she will remain trapped in a state of unresolved longing. Jeanne, too, is swept up by romantic fantasy when her ex-lover Eli (John Berry), an American who nursed her back to health after World War II, comes back into her life. In Jeanne Dielman, Seyrig delivers a masterfully controlled performance as the titular repressed widow, slowly and silently spiralling into darkness. Ten years later, as Jeanne Schwartz (in the second of Seyrig’s three collaborations with Akerman, which also include Letters Home (1986)), the actress’s style is vivid and expressive, with Jeanne floating between merry and aloof—a shopkeeper going through the motions in a partial state of dissociation—and profound yearning. One magnificent sequence in which Jeanne verbalises (in song, of course) her conflicted passion stands out for the way Seyrig shifts between publicly poised and privately flushed with feeling.

Though on one level a frothy affair, Golden Eighties’ delivers hard truths with restraint and subtlety. The cruelties of the modern world poke through the film’s glossy surfaces, creating a tension between reality and ideals—one thinks of the epistolary device Jacques Demy uses to integrate the Algerian War into The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. In Golden Eighties—as in the rest of Akerman’s more explicitly somber work—the spectre of the Holocaust looms. Jeanne is a concentration camp survivor and part of her inability to throw caution to the wind and run away with Eli stems from trauma that makes her cautious and inhibited, resistant to big emotional upheavals. Survivors, as Akerman underscores in her testimony-reliant documentary Dis-moi (1980), both desire and find it extraordinarily difficult to voice their inner lives. As Jeanne explains in her ballad bemoaning her loss of Eli, “I spoke too low.” In the end, Eli finds a new wife, and Jeanne settles back into the calm and reliable life she’s made with her husband. When Lili ultimately finds her way back to Robert, crushing Mado’s heart in the process, does Akerman find hope in these cruel but perhaps refreshingly rash young people?