No Home Movie. 2015. Belgium/France. 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. Now, with Natalia in decline, Akerman observes her “discreetly, almost casually, without pathos” in her Brussels kitchen and in Skype conversations in which 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, of playing with her father’s mustache 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.