Film

In her first narrative feature, Akerman plays a woman holed up in a room where she eats nothing but sugar and compulsively rearranges furniture. Eventually breaking her exile, she embarks on a wayward odyssey that culminates in a filmed-in-real-time sexual encounter with a female lover. At once ascetic and sensual, stark and rich in emotion, Je tu il elle is a landmark investigation of female subjectivity.

Made when she was just 18 years old, Akerman’s incendiary debut short stars the director herself as a young woman performing domestic duties—and unraveling. Addressing the punk nihilism of the film’s explosive climax, Akerman described Saute ma ville as “the opposite of Jeanne Dielman, that was resignation. Here it is rage and death.”