Demain on déménage (Tomorrow We Move). 2004. Belgium/France. Directed by Chantal Akerman. Screenplay by Akerman, Eric de Kuyper. With Sylvie Testud, Aurore Clément, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Natacha Régnier. Restored in 4K by Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman in collaboration The Bureau Sales; DCP courtesy The Bureau Sales. In French; English subtitles. 110 min.
Running through Chantal Akerman’s early-aughts screwball comedy is a subversive undercurrent of survivor’s guilt. Charlotte (Sylvie Testud) is a ditsy, chain-smoking writer who pays the bills by writing bad erotic literature, seeking (but not finding) inspiration in everything from vacuum cleaning to eavesdropping on café conversations. Her oversensitive, recently widowed mother, Catherine (Aurore Clément), who’s given to playing rapturous Romantic piano sonatas, settles in with her, cluttering their bohemian duplex with family heirlooms that are a constant reminder of the dead—her husband’s suitcase, with its dull razor and oversized underwear, her Polish grandmother’s diary from 1924—and driving her batty with maudlin ruminations on chicken smells. As Charlotte resolves to move out, various neurotic apartment-hunters traipse in. In the editing, Claire Atherton dials into the rhythms, incongruities, and all-out choreography through which two Akerman hallmarks flourish: the bond between mother and daughter, and, by the filmmaker’s own admission, an evocation of one of her earliest films. “This film will have something in it of my very first short film, Saute ma ville, made in 1968,” Akerman notes. “A tragicomedy, almost Chaplinesque.”