Akerman's modernist, painterly visual and narrative style is nowhere better expressed or more accessible than in Les Rendezvous d'Anna. This semi-autobiographical film follows a film director, Anna (Aurore Clément), who in turn is following her new film from France to Germany and back again, on the phone-machine instructions of her agent, like some kind of post-Willy Lohman salesman. Anna's world is a fragmented universe of silent train stations and hotel rooms, telephones that won't ring and feelings that won't materialize. With Handke-like precision, Akerman fuses Anna's emotional state onto objects (a tie found in a hotel closet, shoes in the hallway), and onto the people who encounter her. With old friends, new lovers, old lovers, total strangers, Anna becomes the silent audience for personal stories that, taken together, telegraph a half-century of European history, with its social transformations and upheavals. Anna herself has more to say to a desk clerk than to a German man who falls in love with her. Yet Aurore Clément's performance is haunting, and terribly sympathetic; in her we see the loneliness of the artist-as-cypher, who one day will be forced to spill back the stories in a film like Histoires d'Amérique.