Je tu il elle: Chantal Akerman On Loving
Je tu il elle (1974), dir. Chantal Akerman
Ever since I was young, I’ve felt a deep curiosity to know what the feeling of love is like, a curiosity that I’m sure many of us have endured in our lifetime. When I discovered the magic of movies, I started an endless quest to find love perfectly portrayed on film. Not only love, but love through life. And I did find it: I’ve been lucky enough to come across exceptional filmmakers that possess the beautiful gift of being able to tell a story of love so amazing that it stays with an audience, well, forever. Films such as Before Sunrise that intimately show a love story flourishing through dialogue, films such as La La Land that present the imperfect reality of what we know as love, and more. But I couldn’t ever find a perfect middle ground between the romantic fantasy of a love story, and the life I was living as a teenager. I got used to watching love stories, not stories about lovers. That is, until I came across Chantal Akerman, most specifically, Je tu il elle.
Je tu il elle is a story written and told by a lover, for lovers. What I found most interesting about Chantal Akerman’s style of filmmaking is that she completely turns away from conventional storytelling when narrating a tale about love and the magnetism and tragedy that often comes with experiencing this feeling. I’m barely seventeen so it’s no surprise that I may not know anything about the crude concept of love as humanity perceives it, but I will say, from my limited life experience, that love is not something to be expecting comfort out of. It’s an endless experience of enlightenment - one that shouldn’t necessarily be limited to the sharing of life with a single person. We are all naturally lovers, a concept Akerman carefully examines in her movies. There’s no such thing as a human that has never fallen in love before, because before we even realize it, love becomes what we base our whole entire existence on. The “contemporary perception” of love, though, centers around the individual’s recognition of their subjection to love - and this is where we subconsciously instruct our minds to resist the feeling.
I have often referred to Chantal Akerman’s films as love letters, as I quite like the idea of a film acting as a romantic narration towards a being, theme, or place. I saw my first Akerman film, News From Home, as a letter to the figure of mother and the action of letting go, No Home Movie as a letter to the action of losing and so on. Je tu il elle, as I see it, sits at a place of meditation not only about humanity, sex, intimacy and loving but also about the art of film as an act of love. Akerman’s seamlessly natural work helped me see cinema as an extension of reality rather than as an imitation of it, because life is too short to spend it on rebuilding a past that is cemented into ourselves. With such an intimate and devastating examination of loss, the personal connection the viewer has to the film intensifies, allowing them to incorporate elements of the movie into an introspective exercise about life, love, and the impact certain people can have on us. These elements make us reflect on our past, not with the intention to blindly reconstruct it, but with the intention of soaring. ◆