No Home Movie. 2015. Belgium/France. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. DCP courtesy Icarus Films. In French; English subtitles. 115 min.
Chantal Akerman’s final movie, her last will and testament, is about “a woman born in Poland who arrived in Belgium in 1938 to flee pogroms and atrocities. This woman is my mother.” Natalia, mamika, was never far from Akerman’s thoughts or her films. It was always a love story. Now, with Natalia in decline, the child must become the parent to the mother. Akerman observes her “discreetly, almost casually, without pathos,” in her Brussels kitchen (a Proustian jolt of familiarity to those of us who recall her 1968 short Saute ma ville) and in Skype conversations whose prolonged Jewish goodbyes seem to stave off the inevitable. What remains are the warmth of Natalia’s laugh and the toll of her concern, her memories of being smuggled from Germany to Belgium (“no rent for dogs or Jews”), of playing with her father’s moustache and praying on Shabbas, and of beautiful young Chantal, the girl who loved to roughhouse. “Yet the outside world is there,” Akerman insists, ”intruding between the shots of the apartment, like the yellow touch in a painting that brings everything else into existence.” Observing her own reflection on the surface of muddy waters and her shadow on a wall at dusk; tracking a desert landscape from the inside of a car looking out; lingering poetically on a solitary tree as it bends defiantly against the buffeting winds: this is the culminating statement of a lifetime of image-making.