Les rendez-vous d’Anna (The Meetings of Anna). 1978. France/Belgium/Germany. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. With Aurore Clément, Helmut Griem, Magali Noël. 2K restoration by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman; DCP courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 127 min.
“Anna, dov’è se? Where are you?” Traveling on night trains from Cologne to Brussels to Paris—a fallen postwar Europe—a filmmaker (Aurore Clément) has a series of brief yet intense encounters with lovers and strangers who drift in and out of her life and the mother she hasn’t seen in three years, encounters that only remind her of her nomadic existence and the demands from others she can never fully satisfy. Desolate station platforms, railway hotels, and empty beds recently vacated by warm bodies are shot with almost Cartesian precision, in stark frontal symmetries and in long tracking movements whose rhythms change as the film progresses. Like many of Chantal Akerman’s films, Rendezvous with Anna unfurls in extended monologues, about “the price of milk and honey, the price of happiness,” the fiancé she jilted, the German schoolteacher whose wife walked out, the one-night stand unreachable by phone in Italy, and, most primally, the mother with her constant need for reassurance—“Tell me you love me, Chantal. (Always my mother.)” Romantic music hints at melodrama, whether piped through tinny radio speakers or in Clément’s rendition of “Les amants du jour,” a song made famous by Edith Piaf about young lovers who take a hotel room to end their lives together.