Watching Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles for the first time is an act of submission.

Akerman's film runs three hours and twenty-one minutes. For the first two hours, it follows a Brussels widow through her daily routine in real time: cooking, cleaning, caring for her son, managing the domestic transaction of sex work that supplements her household income. Nothing about this is dramatized. Nothing is scored. The camera holds.

What happens in the third hour is the film's argument about what happens when a life lived in total routine is interrupted. I won't be more specific than that.

The reason the film works — the reason it feels like it's about something that matters — is that the duration is the point. You cannot experience what Jeanne's life is like in a forty-minute film. Akerman needed you to be as inside the routine as Jeanne is. The discomfort you feel watching is the intended response.