Critics reviews

There is a thrilling sense of quiet revolution within the film. It originates from the rare experience of a subjective woman’s cine-looking combined with realist representations of bodies, nudity and sex; a unique encounter to have in a cinema, even today.

The poetics of banality are Akerman's field of play throughout Je, Tu, Il, Elle, as she offers this transient world of incidental intimacy and grimy, quotidian peregrination with a perverse fondness for the desolate environs she surveys, rendering all the more intriguing, and frustrating, the free-floating atolls of humanity she encounters.

The structure employed, that of a three-act play in which each segment is strictly delineated, is essential to understanding the character's motivations and thought process. It's the type of choice that perhaps only Akerman would have made, and it's part of the reason the film resonates so powerfully with anyone who has been heartbroken and tried to pick up the pieces.

The first Akerman film I saw as a student was Je, tu, il, elle (1974), a vital piece of performative cinema, and it electrified me. The ambiguous, elastic possibility of collapsing the real and the staged into single images, the relationship between raw self-portraiture and an exploration of the crafted self, the radical use of time passing onscreen as a way to transform everyday experience – it was all there. Akerman was an expressive, fearless filmmaker and this first exposure changed my life.

One of the joys of this film is that while simultaneously delighting in my new reading, I can also abandon it. Where, for instance, is my infant-navigating-the-world theory in the extraordinary and challenging ten-minute sex scene that comes towards the end of the film, that follows on, indeed, from the reaching forward and opening of buttons that led to my first thoughts about infants? One constantly reconsiders and recalibrates while viewing and thinking about this film.