“[T]hese days, surely, it was in these crowded places where thousands of individual itineraries converged for a moment, unaware of one another, that there survived something of the uncertain charm of the waste lands, the yards and building sites, the station platforms and waiting rooms where travellers break step, of all the chance meeting places where fugitive feelings occur of the possibility of continuing adventure, the feeling that all there is to do is to ‘see what happens’.” — Marc Augé in Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna feels like a painfully autobiographical meditation, a lugubrious memoir of the tiring sojourn of its titular protagonist whose one-too-many unresolved romantic encounters and their accompanying slew of emotions run amok in her mind as she travels from one city to another to show her films, as she attempts to connect and reconnect with strangers, lovers, friends and family members. If that sounds like Les Rendez-vous is caught in its own emotional turn-spin, the film’s tone gives quite the opposite impression. Les Rendez-vous couldn’t be more laconic—lest it turn into a Tarkovsky film—and many of the emotions and themes coursing through the film in Anna’s unobtrusive conversations remain disquietingly quiet, seeping discreetly into the nooks and crannies of the empty spaces she inhabits ever so briefly.
Les Rendez-vous follows Anna as she travels across Europe to show her films, but her career is only a backdrop to reveal the sometimes emancipating, sometimes deleterious effects on her personal life. No matter who she talks to or the subject of their conversations, the various settings in which they take place match the equally liminal and detached qualities of Anna’s mobile existence. These settings are, as Marc Augé describes, non-places, “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” which has created “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral.” But the film remains staunchly ambivalent about Anna’s life—neither condemning nor glamorizing her apparent aloofness—and the repetitious use of non-places confirms this. The opening shot, a long static take of a train station, contains a flatness that will repeat in other scenes, but it also carries a serenity that triumphs over the various energies that can exist in such a space: the film shows it completely empty and then suddenly full with passengers as they leave through the exit, which is placed conspicuously dead-center in the frame. The composition of this and similarly framed shots later in the film emphasizes a seemingly out-of-place depth of focus that enlarges the monumental presence of specifically banal objects like train doors and desks, pinpointing the sleek, elegant simplicity of these modern and seemingly barren forms. It’s as if the film is at once admiring non-places but then finding them lacking. More than once, Anna and her acquaintances will leave a frame while the camera remains fixed on the now-empty space (a device found in other films of Akerman’s, like Toute Une Nuit). The subsequent silence feels deafening at first, but it also provides the viewer the opportunity for contemplation. These settings continue to exist after Anna—and the film—have moved on, though the conventions of cinematic storytelling would tell us otherwise. The sentiments that spill forth from the other characters linger in the recently deserted spaces, almost as if their words and physical presences are burned into the frame like an afterimage.
Many of the people Anna meets tend to sublimate their own regret and loneliness onto her—she of a still-promising youth, having yet to settle down, fall in love, marry or have children. Many of these characters treat these life milestones as inevitable events which are now only exciting if they can be prescribed onto Anna. She remains mostly reticent about her own ambitions in life. Her first encounter is with a stranger she brings back to her hotel room the night of her film screening. Anna stops him mid-coitus and tells him to leave; he does so with a silent, frustrated air. As he approaches the door, he tells her, “You meet a woman, you go to her place. You think something wonderful is going to happen. You get your hopes up, and then suddenly, she says ‘get dressed.’ And you’re alone once again. Is life always like that?” Anna’s response elegantly challenges his naiveté: “I often let someone see me home, but I don’t say get dressed. I let it happen. But I don’t tell myself it will be wonderful. I don’t think I tell myself anything.” The scene offers a neatly framed disproof of the then-accepted stereotype of women falling easily into love. Akerman makes Anna not The but An Unmarried Woman, providing an alternative to the gendered image of the forsaken, lonely spinster, surrounded by people who do little else than bemoan their loveless marriages and empty nest eggs. It’s not an easy role for Anna to play, but she remains untouched by the demands placed on her by her older female companions, including her mother and, in a separate scene, her mother’s best friend. “Is there no one to look after you?” her mother asks Anna after she mentions her travel fatigue. When her mother invites her to come home, Anna insists they stay at the restaurant—yet another non-place—just a while longer.
As these remorseful monologues outpour from Anna’s family, friends and acquaintances, her own answers negate the possibility of her own emotions being articulated. Nonetheless, it would be a grave error to assume the film’s protagonist is in love with her lifestyle, that she enjoys being alone, or, on the flipside, that she resents it. If anything, there is almost a shadow of despair that flickers in her eyes when she asks her mother to stay at the restaurant longer, likewise when she insists that the two of them check into a hotel instead of going to Anna’s childhood home. Unlike the stranger she meets on the train to Brussels, who considers his failures in life a direct result of not living in the right city (he is on his way to Paris), Anna does not share his naive optimism by making tumultuous life changes in order to regain a sense of vitality. If anything, Anna is addicted to the liminal existence and ambience of non-places; she thoroughly enjoys her nomadic lifestyle, but she would admit that it is not without its problems. The film ends as she finally, reluctantly enters her dark, desolate, and untouched apartment. She listens to her answering machine, a flow of messages by people who can just barely contain their feelings, but her countenance remains blank, indicating a flux of contradictory emotion, including regret, sadness, desire, and/or indifference. She may be An Unmarried Woman but she is The Modern Woman, living a confusing but liberating way of life in which she must swallow the hardships of contemporary individuality.