J'ai faim, j'ai froid (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold). 1984. France. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. With Maria de Medeiros, Pascale Salkin, Esmoria Manibal. 4K restoration by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman. In French; English subtitles. 12 min.
In this “little musical comedy without singing” (Chantal Akerman), two runaway teenage girls from Belgium, ravenous with hunger but with scarcely a sou to their name, cook up a scheme to cadge meals in Paris. They end up with more than they bargained for. Whether in want or in excess, food is central to many of Chantal Akerman’s films (for starters, in Jeanne Dielman, Tell Me, and Histoires d’Amerique). Hunger is a need that can never be sated.
Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels). 1994. France. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. DCP courtesy Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman. In French; English subtitles. 61 min.
For the French television series All the Boys and Girls of Their Age, notable filmmakers including Olivier Assayas (Cold Water) and Claire Denis (US Go Home) were invited to make coming-of-age stories, each of which would use period music and fashion from a particular decade and culminate in a dance scene. Chantal Akerman’s is the tenderest of contributions, at the crossroads of Jean-Luc Godard and Richard Linklater in its disregard of anachronisms and narrative conventions. On a bright and momentous day in Brussels, April 1968, the endearingly precocious, slightly rebellious, and melancholic Michèle decides to stop going to school. A spontaneous kiss at a cinema with a Parisian boy, a deserter from the French army, sets in motion a flood of thoughts and feelings (“I’m completely in agreement with this Kierkegaard guy”). The sorrows of her parents, the specter of wars past and present, and the uncertainty of her place in a man’s world loom large in her imagination. Michèle has the makings of a writer; not for nothing does Akerman repurpose the airplane sounds and birdsong she had used in Letters Home, her film about Sylvia Plath.