SAUTE MA VILLE

Like its more famous offspring, Jeanne Dielman’s precursor, the 1968 short <![CDATA[<i>]]>Saute Ma Ville<![CDATA[</i>]]>, locates a species of madness in the domestic rituals of female life. But whereas the eponymous heroine of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece at least initially seems to thrive on the order that these rituals provide, the younger heroine of the earlier film seems determined from the start to smash them to bits. And yet the pattern in both films is the same: we see a woman go about the ordinary routines of domesticity, only to eventually detect cracks in the armor and to witness a final descent into violent aberration. That these fissures become apparent much quicker in <![CDATA[<i>]]>Saute Ma Ville<![CDATA[</i>]]> than Dielman is a tribute to the earlier film’s astonishing compression – 13 tightly packed minutes rather than the 3 1/2 equally necessary hours of the later work.