Introduction to the French Avant-Garde, Part II: Postscript

As promised in a May review of her breakthrough film, we return to Belgian/French artist Chantal Akerman and cover two recent films: her final effort, which is a documentary about her mother, and a 67-minute career retrospective that celebrates her independent filmmaking.

NO HOME MOVIE (B) - Chantal Akerman's swan song begins with a static shot, lasting a couple of minutes, of a tree in a sparse landscape being battered by an unforgiving gale. The rather gaunt tree stands up to the whipping, relying on its firm roots to keep it alive against the extreme forces of nature.

Akerman, a Belgian-born outsider on the fringes of French cinema the past four decades, seems to be telling admirers and detractors alike that she's a survivor. And no matter what the world throws at her, she's not budging from her arch approach to life.

Here, she turns her curious camera on her own mother, Natalia, at the end of the elderly woman's life. (In a morbid postscript, Chantal Akerman would die of an apparent suicide at age 65 not long after completing the film, so she wasn't so fiercely determined to survive, after all.) We watch as the pair go through the mundane routine of a daughter visiting her mother, with some obvious baggage between the two. At times they are joined by Chantal's sister, Sylvaine, and hired caretakers who help with the mother's deteriorating condition.

In a nod to her most famous work (1975's "Jeanne Dielman," with its memorable extended take of a woman preparing a meatloaf and mashed potatoes), daughter and mother sit at the kitchen table -- neither's face visible to the camera -- and dine on meat and potatoes, ruminating randomly on Chantal's domestic skills. In an acknowledgment of the modern era, they Skype during the daughter's travels across Europe and the United States. When Natalia complains to Sylvaine about Chantal's reluctance to open up, Sylvaine defends her sister and insists that Chantal talks to their Natalia all the time. But the mother complains, "She never tells me anything important."

When in Natalia's home, Chantal plants her camera firmly and lets it peer through main doorways, sometimes not concerned that her mother isn't in the room but can be heard toddling about just out of the shot. (It's as if Akerman is imagining what the house will be like after her mother is gone.) In one scene, Chantal sneaks around the house in near darkness in an effort to peep on her mother. As her mother's health declines, Chantal aims the camera at the mother sleeping in an easy chair, invading the woman's privacy. It's both intimate and borderline exploitative.

"A child sees what a child sees," Akerman intones at one point. At the halfway point, we get another extended exterior shot -- outside a car window as it zips along another barren countryside. This one seems to last even longer than the opening shot. Is it Akerman trying to escape from the clutches of her mother? Is it a symbol of the mother's inevitable crossing over into the next realm? Akerman shoots a murky body of water, and we can barely detect in the muck a reflection of her shadow, camera attached to her face, as usual. It's a ghastly, ghostly image that perhaps foreshadows her own death.

Mother and daughter obviously have a fraught, strained relationship. Akerman, with large piercing blue eyes, seems to be constantly struggling to hold herself together. It's obvious that Natalia, like a lot of mothers, doesn't really understand her daughter and the outre choices she made over the years. None of this gets articulated in words.

A closing scene echoes one of the early establishment shots of the mother's meticulously furnished home in Brussels. It's a credenza in a hallway. Atop it appear to be two urns, side-by-side. I wasn't sharp enough to have remembered the early establishment shots and to have noticed whether the same image had contained only one urn. Even so, it's a potent tribute, a nod across generations of the potent bond and the limitations of blood ties.

I DON'T BELONG ANYWHERE: THE CINEMA OF CHANTAL AKERMAN (B-minus) - This slim, efficient documentary feels like it doesn't do justice to the career of a woman whose work can be difficult to reconcile.

We sample from the greatest hits: "Je Tu Il Elle"; her calling card, "Jeanne Dielman," about the trivial household tasks of a single mother who happens to take lovers in her home for money; two revelatory documentaries from the '90s, "D'Est" (about life behind the Iron Curtain) and "Sud" (about the American South); and a disastrous 1996 bid for mainstream recognition, the romantic comedy (!) "A Couch in New York," with a rosy-cheeked Juliette Binoche and a surly William Hurt, whose diva behavior on the set provide some of Akerman's best reflections. (We're overdue to view "Jeanne Dielman," and the two documentaries look fascinating.)

First-time director Marianne Lambert struggles to add a layer of profundity to the proceedings, but she seems not better equipped than any of us to understand her subject or unravel the mystery of the filmmaker's oeuvre. The chain-smoking filmmaker is a fairly slippery subject, her intense gaze perhaps intimidating the less experienced documentarian. Talking heads don't offer much more insight. One of our favorites, Aurore Clement (seen most recently in "The New Girlfriend"), offers recollections from the '70s, when she starred in Akerman's "The Meetings of Anna." American director Gus Van Sant comes off as a bland fanboy, admitting to cribbing from "Jeanne Dielman" for the domestic scenes in his moody Kurt Cobain dramatization "Lost Days" from 2005.

But Lambert does not come up completely empty. It's here that Akerman, knitting this project together with the one above, acknowledges that her mother was central to her work. She wonders aloud what impact her mother's death will have on any future output. Alas, her own death makes that point moot.