How Anom­al­isa echoes the exis­ten­tial blues of Chan­tal Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle

“What is it be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive?” asks cus­tomer ser­vice expert Michael Stone in Char­lie Kauf­man and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion mas­ter­piece Anom­al­isa. These are the same ques­tions that the late Bel­gium film­mak­er Chan­tal Aker­man posed over 30 years ago in her black-and-white debut fea­ture Je, Tu, Il, Elle.

Though the film­mak­ers’ approach­es and pro­tag­o­nists couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent, both Akerman’s hun­gry young woman, Julie, and Kaufman’s mid­dle-aged man embark on sim­i­lar exis­ten­tial jour­neys while also search­ing for some form of human con­nec­tion. Both film pro­vide pro­found exam­i­na­tions of alien­ation, regret and the human condition.

Julie, suf­fer­ing from a recent break-up, has con­fined her­self to her bed­room for one month with only a bare mat­tress and a pen and paper for com­fort. She gob­bles on pow­dered sug­ar from a brown paper bag while pon­der­ing her exis­tence. When we first meet Anomalisa’s Michael we see him dwelling on a failed rela­tion­ship, grasp­ing a crum­pled let­ter from for­mer lover while on a plane bound for the city where she now lives. Julie too decides to return to her past, break­ing her self-imposed hia­tus from the out­side world by hitch­ing a ride to vis­it her ex-girlfriend.

Michael’s ven­ture through the dim­ly lit cor­ri­dors of the lush Fre­goli Hotel, where he is due to give a con­fer­ence on cus­tomer ser­vice, takes place over the course of 24 hours and though Julie quite lit­er­al­ly nav­i­gates wind­ing roads on her jour­ney, Michael is appar­ent­ly the more weary trav­eller. His search at first leads him to dis­ap­point­ment as his pathet­ic attempt to bed his ex is shut­down almost instan­ta­neous­ly. But then his spir­its are lift­ed when he hears the voice of a shy woman named Lisa, who he hooks up with after a few rounds of apple moji­tos. Both char­ac­ters find com­fort in impul­sive, alco­hol-fuelled sex­u­al encoun­ters, with Julie shar­ing a few glass­es of wine with a truck dri­ver before giv­ing him a hand job. Towards the end of her jour­ney, Julie meets her ex-part­ner who pro­vides sex­u­al nour­ish­ment and hap­pi­ly soothes Julie’s crav­ings for one night only. Is one night of bliss enough to keep these char­ac­ters emo­tion­al­ly sated?

Aker­man employs a qui­et ambi­ence with Julie, occa­sion­al­ly nar­rat­ing like she’s read­ing extracts from a diary. She says of the truck dri­ver, ​“I realised I felt like kiss­ing him,” which brings to mind Marielle Heller’s recent film The Diary of a Teenage Girl with a sense of long­ing and sad­ness akin to Sophie Calle’s ​‘Exquis­ite Pain’. In typ­i­cal Kauf­man style, Michael voic­es long streams of dia­logue to com­mu­ni­cate his feel­ings, his psy­che accu­mu­lat­ing all his guilt and turn­ing it in to a bizarre night­mare sequence. Both char­ac­ters are lost but are attempt­ing to take a long hard look at themselves.

Aker­man and Kauf­man use mir­rors as a metaphor for self-reflec­tion. When Michael stares at him­self after his encounter with his ex he starts to mal­func­tion. Is the truth he sees too much for him to han­dle? Mean­while, Julie lux­u­ri­ates in her own reflec­tion of her­self, tak­ing her sweet time study­ing the real­i­ty of her sit­u­a­tion. The dif­fer­ence between the char­ac­ters’ age gives them dis­tinct per­spec­tives on the human con­di­tion with the notion of time run­ning out an increas­ing­ly impor­tant factor.

Both films keen­ly observe the deci­sions we make for a chance at fleet­ing and pos­si­bly long-term hap­pi­ness. Are Julie and Michael doomed to make the same mis­takes over and over again? Anom­al­isa shows a char­ac­ter resigned to his mis­ery. Je, Tu, Il, Elle asks vital ques­tions but is less inter­est­ed in pro­vid­ing answers, instead focus­ing on the impor­tance of the experience.