i am never not thinking about malls but this is the time of year i normally take a masochistic fifteen minute dip into our finest suburban megamall to really Lose Myself. i have instead found comfort in chantal akerman's golden eighties, a perfect depiction of the mall's highest highs and lowest lows—its bombastic swamphood. it is the perfect location for a romance, perfect location for a musical. a place you are both hidden & always being watched.
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| sylvie singing of love's expansiveness while trapped behind the cafe counter |
the best malls create the illusion that there is nothing else—this is the entire universe. scant natural lighting, no windows. the walkways are the streets (a false sense of pedestrian agency). all is sucked into this current. if the whole world is ambling, unceasing material desire, then it would be foolish not to join. akerman perfectly captures this, audience & characters glued to the tiny series of workplaces. it is one of her greatest strengths as a filmmaker—convincing you that the room is all there is. there are missives from the outside world, weather reports delivered by incoming attire, but we will never see any of the weddings or grand travel plans unfold. we r here, breathing heavy from behind a rack of blouses. we might end up trying something on.
golden eighties is the story of several interlocking romances. robert—the mall's handsome idiot prince—is infatuated with lili, the striking manager of the hair salon where stylists pascale and mado also pine for him. lili is dependent on her relationship with married salon owner mr. jean. robert works for his parents in a formalwear store where his mother jeanne is struck by a chance encounter with american traveler eli, an old flame never extinguished. sylvie is the barista/bartender, an emotional narrator of sorts, someone to set the tone of romance's necessary pain and possibility—its ability to conjure a world outside of the mall filled with get-rich-quick schemes and quaking oceans. she is also the first to (quietly) give up on love. |
| jeanne prepares for the morning rush |
we r inevitably drawn to delphine seyrig, who plays mall matriarch jeanne schwartz. she is not jeanne dielman proper but some cosmic extension of akerman/seyrig's other tragic jeanne. 2 women who could successfully man a cash register while on fire. jeanne schwartz has a bounce in her step, though perhaps a bit put-on. she is married to a man who has delusions of entrepreneurial glory but his time spent fixated on business gives her a little more breathing room. she serves as the mall's confessional, and her advice is generally terrible—soothing half-truths, unbelievable platitudes, fake smiles. in addition to everyone's secrets, she carries trauma from the holocaust that is exposed fully in the movie's final scene.
akerman gives jeanne the amount of cameratime that convention would usually award to mado, the young, cute, and naive stylist to whom robert proposes in a jealousy plot. but there's an understanding that these two constitute halves of the same whole. jeanne's suffering is a part of mado's, her deep knowledge of misplaced unions setting her into a slow unraveling that is perhaps not that far from jeanne dielman. the whole mall's romantic life seems to be one breathing object, a tipped scale.
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| jeanne lost forever in a crowd of shoppers RIP |
i love akerman's portrayal of the poorly behaved masses. jeanne & eli's reunion is immediately divided by clashing tornados of shoppers. each character is tormented by endless gawkers, especially the chorus of men who behave most like the geese who might chase you on your way back to your car. the only pause in their frantic intrusion is for gossip. many of the store employees behave in the same way, ignoring or manhandling shoppers in the undying prioritization of romance and intrigue. in an early scene, a desperate customer cries out, "is anyone working here?" the answer—as it should be—is no.
nothing has ever been more important than gossip. especially about one's boss. the soothing news of a tyrant's human flaws—they are suddenly more fragile, toppleable. in perhaps the greatest musical number, the salon's stylists aggressively wash & dry their clients heads to an urgent beat. they are desperate for The Scoop, risking life and limb. a violent crescendo of need—A RETURN TO THE PRIMAL. WHO WILL PROVE THE MOST GAGA FOR GOSS??? no one is free from this all-consuming thirst.
the mall is the only place i've ever worked that was incomprehensibly pulsing with romance. i would have moved mountains to spend seven minutes in heaven with any of my hot topic managers, three thirty-something women who were gracelessly leaning in to the slow crisis of aging-while-goth. there were a few store romances that were so spicy i DID want to kick over the display shelves and jangle the jewelry cases. anyway, to see someone from across the mall daily—as robert and mado share—is to have the unbelievable reality of your wage labor existence confirmed. there is a bond, however unhealthy.
this movie wants you to know how it will turn out—who will suffer and whose happiness is truly up for grabs. people want what they want and sometimes don't get it, shouldn't get it. chantal akerman has the perfect way of reducing each feeling to an honest simplicity. she is often ready to be nora ephron-saccharine just to pull out the rug, but she's never wrong. ultimately, it's love, work, death. a fuck marry kill w/ these three, one always haunting us, one giving life, one humiliating.
that the movie ends with a rejected bride crying to a stream of rapidly worsening advice seems the most fitting tribute to the experience of a mall. who has not stood near the wrong department store exit—hands full of shopping bags—on the brink of full meltdown? it's less of a movie about love than it is a movie about deciding how someone else should live—trying to move a few pieces around on the chessboard while they aren’t looking.
anyway, the mall is ultimately for voyeurs. (sometimes perverts.) to use the mall for shopping is to frankly to let the mall play you. & as chantal akerman would have us believe, love is best when it interrupts the operations of a business. even greater when it takes out the entire mall. i have not given up hope that i will one day meet my most true love at the food court sbarro & the entire complex will quiver at our feet. adieu~
