The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER   ***1/2

Tony Richardson

1962

IDEA:  Colin Smith, arrested for a petty theft, is sent to a reform school. Once there, the institution's governor recognizes his talent for running and wishes to use it to prove the school can successfully rehabilitate its charges. But will Colin, chronically resistant to authority, comply?

BLURB:  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner pulses with the energy of the French New Wave and beats with the aching heart of neorealism, finding the perfect midpoint between its restless, whirling camera movements and the inescapable grit of its backdrops to reflect on an immortal human condition. Tom Courtenay’s young, agitated working class Brit is our anchor – his is a rebel both inspirational and doomed, operating with a perpetual arrogance that would seem foul if it weren't also a necessary tool in maintaining his identity. But although his resentment towards an unjust social order is earned, it is not fruitful. His unwillingness to compromise is admirable, but it only alienates him more. Through Courtenay’s astonishing performance, the characterization of a man running into his own estrangement becomes a sobering indictment: not just of the inequities of society, but of the limits of the individual who ultimately cannot prosper outside the system that shames him.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES   ****

Chantal Akerman

1975

IDEA:  A woman goes about her everyday schedule: making the bed, washing dishes, preparing dinner for her son, brushing her hair, and occasionally turning a trick.

BLURB:  For its hypnotic, sedative cadences; for its fastidious depiction of spatial dynamics; for its temporal experimentation, harnessing shape, light, color, sound and composition to convey reservoirs of subdued pain; for its rigorous documentation of time, visibly passing; for its social critique of bourgeois complacency, female repression, and stifled sexuality; but most of all, for the ways in which it communicates, agonizingly, the comforts and indignities of routine, Jeanne Dielman is a masterpiece. Stretching out across 200 minutes but focusing intently on only one woman and a couple of rooms, it manages to turn simple domesticity into an occasion for existential dread. Long, structured takes let us read the frames from top to bottom and left to right, soaking up their patterns with the same studiousness by which Jeanne runs her life. This film “reality” is so familiar and so mundane it moves past notions of real or cinematic and merely becomes transcendent. But then it slips into disorder. After having paid careful attention to each detail, we immediately realize when the symmetry has been thrown out of whack. Cracks begin to show. Each missed beat puts us on edge. Anxiety in the viewer grows in tandem with the character. Akerman unflinchingly shows us what few, if any, even dare: not just the crisis of women locked into programmed roles, but the subtle malevolence of the ordinary.