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 the 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 ominous, excruciating, even Hitchcock-like tension rises when Jeanne simply forgets to put the lid on her cash kitty or turn off the light, when the potatoes begin to burn... 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," a masterful integration of the commercial feature with the avant-garde film. In showing "a woman's life...in all its real duration," Chantal Akerman rejects any suggestion of naturalism. "By means of a very stylized image," she said, "I want to reach the very essence of reality."