What is the first thing that comes to mind when people think of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)? At over three hours in length, it makes for a very long film.

Chantal Akerman’s profile of a widowed domestic woman going about her daily routines is considered a classic of experimental feminist cinema. While it appears to be about nothing, its minimalist approach allows it to be simultaneously about nothing and everything. Still, for many viewers, the question arises: does it need to be so long? Is it important that we watch Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) clean potatoes for ten minutes? Wouldn’t say, five, be enough? Many critics would argue: no. As noted by Jonathan Rosenbaum in his book Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, “Jeanne Dielman needs its running time, for its subject is an epic one, and the overall sweep of two days allows one to observe the patterns and their variations, trains one to recognize and respond to fluctuations and nuances… If a radical cinema is something that goes to the roots of experience, this is at the very least a film that shows where and how some of these roots are buried.” In other words, if Jeanne Dielman were any shorter, it wouldn’t open itself up to such meaningful interpretation or be able to build such drama from the seemingly minor complications Jeanne faces during the day.

London City Nights adds, “One of the most exciting events in Jeanne Dielman is when she drops a spoon on the floor. It’s the kind of film where the prospect of some potatoes being overcooked is an epoch changing catastrophe. Not much happens in Jeanne Dielman. It’s a three and a half hour long film depicting two and a half days in the life of a slowly unraveling housewife (and occasional sex worker) and by the end of it by god you’re going to know exactly how soul-crushingly miserable domesticity is.”

Jeanne Dielman creates drama solely within the type of material other films ignore. The movie is nothing but a series of mundane details. It posits that the story of a woman who is detached and alone from the world is just as important as a big, epic, sweeping fantasy. Jeanne deserves our attention as much as any other subject, if not more.

The AV Club writes, “The strategy makes viewers feel the oppressive limits of Jeanne’s world and how her routines box her into an existential prison. There are indications that she’s deeply unhappy—a concerned letter from a sister in Canada, her obviously chilly relationship with her son, the mechanical joylessness with which she goes about her daily business—but Akerman presents none of these clues in a conventional way. For a film that luxuriates in dull repetition, Jeanne Dielman is strangely hypnotic, perhaps because it taps into the voyeuristic sensation of seeing how a person really lives.”

Three Quarks Daily adds, “Some viewers might argue that we don’t need to see Jeanne make and re-make her cup of coffee, rejecting each after the first taste, or that we don’t need to see her prepare every slice of veal for battering, or that we don’t need to see the entire solemn dinners that take place in her household from start to finish. I argue that we do need to see all these things, and more besides. To show three seconds of Jeanne fastidiously running a chamois over Sylvain’s (Jan Decorte) shoes, scrubbing away at her own body, or sitting motionlessly in the living room as her perception of time falls back into alignment — to cut when audiences declare that they ‘get it’ — wouldn’t abbreviate the film. It would destroy the film.”

By forming an understanding of the static mechanism of Jeanne’s life, something like dropping a spoon on the floor becomes an atomic bomb. Jeanne’s routine is largely emotionless, but its predictability and regimen clearly bring her some form of comfort. Why that is the case is unknown—as with all Jeanne’s behaviors and quirks, we’re left to assume how she got that way. She treats everything with the same stoic demeanor. Folding the bedsheets and washing dishes are given the same emotional weight as the johns she services every afternoon for money. Why do they keep returning to this robotic zombie every week? Why does her relationship with her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) hardly seem any more passionate than her interactions with the random men who visit for sex? What caused all this hinted depravity beneath the surface of such a seemingly normal, everyday woman? Rosenbaum says “everything is a clue and nothing offers a solution.” Every moment we watch Jeanne go through her motions is one spent immersed in her mundanity.

“No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert once wrote, “and no bad movie is short enough.” Jeanne Dielman takes that attitude to heart. Although it is an undeniable commitment and test of will to watch, the film wouldn’t do itself justice with less time spent on the minutiae that make it what it is.