Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974)

Sugar, Solitude, and Skin - Je, Tu, Il, Elle review by griggs

There’s something unnervingly familiar about watching someone eat sugar straight from a bag, then quietly put it back when it spills. Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature, Je Tu Il Elle, opens with depression rendered so precisely it barely feels like fiction. Furniture gets rearranged. Clothes come off. Nothing helps. That’s the whole point.

The three-part structure is a bit uneven, and the middle stretch drifts, but Akerman writing, directing and putting herself on screen gives it a rawness that sticks. It never feels decorative. The final section is the one that really lingers: a long sex scene filmed with real tenderness and none of the usual sleaze, which still feels bracingly honest now.

What stays with me most is the fearlessness of it. Akerman lays herself completely bare here, and not in a performative way. It feels lonely, searching, and weirdly intimate — like she’s worked out how to turn aimlessness itself into cinema.