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One thing Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) never does is tell you what to think. It does, however, know something about its audience and the reliability of human behavior. In a film where almost nothing happens, the mind is given free reign to wander and make its own interpretations. The brain supposes things and wants to make assumptions in an attempt to ascribe more context and substance to what it’s being shown. Jeanne Dielman provides ample time to ponder the character, her situation, her routines, her behaviors, as it deprives the viewer of any direct character motivations. If it weren’t for the film’s title, we might not even know Jeanne’s name. Despite the tight setting and monotony of her life, the film is a wide-open acreage upon which the viewer’s suppositions can roam. The film is called avant-garde, artistic, experimental, feminist—whatever it is, it fits that category because of its allowances. The vacuous lack of information allows it to be adopted into any ideological makeup.

Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) is tremendously efficient in her tedium. She cooks potatoes and cleans up the kitchen. She prostitutes herself for funds which she stashes in a china pot on the dining room table. She finishes up her chores in the kitchen and heads to the bedroom to crack the windows. She takes a bath, she sponges off, then gets dressed again. Then it’s back to the kitchen to finish dinner before her drudging and even-more-dull-than-her teenage son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) gets home to help her occupy space. All the while, the rhythmic flipping of an unexplained light outside the apartment stammers across the walls of Jeanne’s home, rolling across the frame with metronomic certainty, regimented and infallible in its routine.

As the first day in Jeanne Dielman represents order in the life of its titular character, the second seems to represent some form of chaos. Sylvain goes to school early, Jeanne ends up in town when the shops aren’t open (so she’s forced to stand around in front of closed stores) and she overcooks her potatoes. She can’t just turn them into mashed potatoes instead, her schedule of bland dinners is as maintained as everything else, and it’s not the night for mash. But after seeing the strict methodology of Jeanne’s life in the first day, these minor follies in day two seem like gargantuan problems. The drama is knowing that they are wrong, and not knowing what the consequence of that wrongness will be. After all—nothing really happens when her life goes according to plan, so what will happen when things misfire?

Director Chantal Akerman didn’t like the film being labeled with specific -isms, and said the film could just as easily have been done with a man. Jeanne Dielman is regularly labeled as an example of feminism because it stars a woman and presents a story about domesticity, sex, and death. After the film ends, the camera hanging on Jeanne’s face for an eternity as she emotes through an almost unreadable facial expression, it’s as hard to interpret as everything else in the film. Is the ending a feminist hurrah? The film could just as easily qualify as surreal or noir or any other libidinal cinematic label. However, the way Akerman gives her female character free space to roam without using exploitative cinematic techniques or conforming to any established philosophy is a major citation for feminist labeling.

Jeanne Dielman is, above all, a film about how Jeanne’s domestic routine falls apart while the formula of the cinema doesn’t. From its opening moments to its closing “climax,” the film maintains the same minimalist, slow-paced, struggle-free presentation as the rest of the film. The final murder is treated like it’s just another flipped light switch or folded bed sheet; a routine bit of Jeanne’s day. The minimalist approach is naturally anti-psychology and we’re never privy to what goes on in Jeanne’s mind. Again, it is easily interpreted as feminist material but is equally easy to ascribe to a wealth of ideologies due to its formidable ambiguity.

In his essay “She’s Come Undone,” Patrick Kinsman writes, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is countercinematic not primarily because it interrogates the representation of reality (although it does), but because its aesthetic of representation shows the failure of a mode of discipline of which it should instead guarantee the success. Akerman’s hyperrealism is too much an excess of reality—a feminist display of those daily gestures so often elided—to fetishize the actress, but the fictiveness of the star and the murder are too present to let the film seem to be a naturalist documentary. This ‘wavering between the naturalistic and the symbolic,’ reinforced by the anti-psychological filming, makes Jeanne neither an individual nor an essentialized type. Instead of ‘a woman,’ the film shows private gestures and private space, which are given hyperbolic presence by the minimalist and omnipresent camera style. Jeanne Dielman presents—more than represents—to us the disciplining and disciplined gestures of a gendered role under contemporary capitalism, and it also presents, with the same rigorous, surveilling cinematography, the failure of that project. It is the hyper reality guaranteed by Akerman’s filming style that makes the fragmentation of ideological ‘docility’ inescapably present.”

The New Yorker referred to the film as “a signal act of modernism that fuses—or, rather, deconstructs—the classical melodrama with feminist ideology, personal history, documentary curiosity, video-art-like installations, and an extraordinarily straightforward, Gordian-knot-cutting way with character-based empathy. It’s the kind of radical artistic simplification that embodies and conveys an amazingly complex web of ideas.”

The anxieties felt by a widowed woman living alone are felt by the viewer as they follow those stresses for over three hours. It becomes prudent to experience that anxiety and think about how things got this way for the character. Why is she a prostitute? What happened to her husband? Why is Sylvain so odd? What is this crazy repetitious light flashing in her window, and would the film’s atmosphere be complete without it? The real-time voyeurism of Jeanne’s unmotivated life provide ample time to get a feeling for her life without knowing anything about it. We live with her and share her burdens without knowing why. We sympathize with the way she finds comfort in habit yet we don’t know why we’re in need of such comfort. And so we design the reasons.

The best films realize that the things we see and the things we don’t see are equally valuable. Jeanne Dielman is over three hours of seeing almost nothing except the details that most films skip. It is the disheartening danger of by-the-book domesticity. Jeanne Dielman’s content and structure coexist in structure and khaki splendor, and we’re left to give it meaning.