Three days in the life of a forty-year-old bourgeoise widow are depicted in three hours and fifteen minutes of film. We watch Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) perform the endlessly repetitious, robotized routines she requires to maintain her fusty home and care for her pampered, sullen son, structured and precisely timed activities which include prostituting herself each afternoon in her own tidy bedroom after she puts the potatoes on to boil and before her boy returns from school. Our focus is on the intricacies of movement, the turning on and off of lights, the rinsing of dishes, the opening and shutting of cupboards. And so thoroughly familiar have we become, half way through the film, with the structure of this woman's life that an excrutiating, Hitchcock-like tension emerges when Dielman simply forgets to put the lid on her cash kitty, or turn off a light, or when the potatoes begin to burn...in short, when Jeanne begins to fall apart. What might have been a film as tedious as the life it depicts is a tight, engrossing, and exhilarating experiment with a new kind of “melodrama,” and a masterful integration of the commercial feature with the avant-garde film. In showing “a woman's life...in all its real duration,” Akerman rejects any suggestion of naturalism. “By means of a very stylized image,” she says, “I want to reach the very essence of reality.” Jeanne Dielman was shot by an all-woman crew.