The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman

MOVIE #1,440 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.14.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM I should probably mention the “watchable version” problem, which might become the “unavailable” problem at some point down the road. I have isolated 50 works by both Chantal Akerman and Albert Pyun: this is the basis for the project, that there is an equal number of films — mostly all narrative features as it pertains to the latter, and a wide variety of shorts, full-lengths, episodic TV work, documentaries, etc. concerning Akerman — IS essential to this 1:1 examination. But as both of these auteurs operated on the fringes, to a degree (and there is the added language barrier in Akerman’s oeuvre), I cannot guarantee that I’ll be able to track down movies with accurate subtitles, good resolution, and so on. Just finding some of these at all will require every ounce of my internet sleuthing skills, which are probably average at best to begin with.

This has never stopped me before, however (see my reviews of lost films). I believe that a spiritual connection can be made to a film even if you aren’t able to see it. If this sounds like dumb-ass mumbo jumbo that’s because it is. I like to lean into the absurd, what can I say?

In the case of Akerman’s second short, L'Enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (English: The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman) — which, was just packaged on a big Criterion box set that I am not about to shell out $80+ for (sorry, I don't even have a Blu-Ray player) — I was able to find a terrible upload (somewhere, apparently a month ago, and I literally cannot find it again now!) sans subtitles. I messed around with some A.I. crap and got some interesting results. A software called “Rask” actually can dub translated vocals in English that’s astonishingly realistic while actually keeping the ambient soundtrack intact as well) but the free version only allowed me to convert one-minute of this thirty-minute short. And again, I simply can’t pay for a subscription at this time. I live paycheck-to-paycheck and make no money off this endeavor. Please do the math.

So on a whim I uploaded ⅓ of the film as an experiment to YouTube and it auto-generated subtitles in French that were then auto-translated to English for me (thanks YouTube). I have no idea how accurate these results are — for example…


— but I was ready to roll with it so I uploaded the second and third parts thinking that YouTube would do the same and I could watch it with English translation (even if it was extremely wrong lol) but it just… didn’t do that for the other two videos. Very frustrating. I must have hit refresh twenty times checking to see if the subtitles were made available. No luck.

So here at Movie #2, we’ve hit the first crossroads of what I’m sure will be many on this long journey. How should I ingest The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman? It was an easy decision for me: watch the first part with the (probably wrong) English subs and then the rest of it at 1.5x speed, whilst live-blogging the whole endeavor. And so that’s what I did…

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗱, 𝗼𝗿 𝗜 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝘁 𝗕𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗪𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼-𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱/𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼-𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯 𝟭.𝟱𝘅 2x 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗟𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗴

• The first strain of what have to be inaccurate subtitles read, poetically, “all you will see you will see you will see us we will achieve something great.”
• There’s nothing in the frame, the camera is focused on a blank wall.
• Claire and Francine (these might be the characters’ names).
• We cut to a lady in a field. The file almost appears to be simply filmed off of a projection on a wall. I’m not sure, but it’s bad in a beautiful way.
• We see a young lady get undressed in an interior. Somehow YouTube didn’t flag this for nudity (I guess because the quality is so low?).
• A child is with her. The beloved child? The titular beloved child? Must be. Yes. Hmmm.
• The subtitles aren’t even picking up all the audio, so it’s inaccurate fragments of an already totally broken thing.
• They’re talking about Santa Claus now (and the “land of elephants” — I want so badly to know if this is completely wrong).
• This probably checks out, though…

• I paused to check IMDb and one of these two adult actors is indeed Akerman again. We see her listening to a friend on the bed. This is the titular “married woman” (Claire Wauthion as La jeune mère, “the young mother” — not sure who Francine is supposed to be).
• They're clearly, in part, talking about what’s obviously the subject matter (I mean, it’s all there in the lengthy title). I’m sure there are plenty of errors but give it up to the fine folks at Google/YouTube for this partial translation. Gotta love tech, right?
• An example, verbatim: "I have the impression I have I have something in me like that which makes otherwise I won’t be so nice at home I won’t it wouldn’t be so harmonious if I something like that you know you."
• And that’s the end of the subtitled portion of my viewing. I will now enter 1.5x speed because this is just two people talking on a bed in a language I don’t understand.
• Per the IMDb description: “A young mother, alone with her daughter, confides in a friend who happens to be the director herself. Chantal Akerman, although she sympathizes with the mother, does not say a word.” That’s an incredibly odd way to frame a fictional work. Directors act in films all the time.
• Have switched to 2x speed.
• We see the mother move a ladder. We see her naked again, in front of a mirror. She continues to speak and I can’t understand a word.
• There’s an otherworldly quality to watching something like, in this way: like I’m not supposed to be seeing it. That it wasn’t meant for me.
• I really wish I could read the filtered text. Why the beginning and not the middle and the end, Google? …

• They make the bed together and then have a snack. The snack is a wordless encounter. I can understand eating.
• We see the married woman in the kitchen do chores and hear her child off-screen. She’s cooking and we see her glance out the window occasionally. She’s a’ makin’ the sauce!
• She drains pasta and hums a tune (a callback to Blow Up My Town, perhaps?).
• Knowing the focus of Akerman’s most famous work, we see what’s clearly a thread she started stitching from the beginning.
• She tidies up after her kid. If viewed in the ‘correct’ fashion I could see how this would be a long half an hour.
• It ends with the three of them sitting down for a meal.

The most popular review for this on Letterboxd (it’s only been logged 250+ times) has 8 likes, and reads, simply…


I have no choice but to agree with this fierce ★★★½ assessment. But as this was just (finally) put out on an official release, other reviews have trickled in within the last three weeks. An example:

Akerman’s spiritual precursor to Jeanne Dielman - it has similarly languid pacing, and also focuses on women reckoning with domestic roles and the passage of time. Simultaneously an impressive early work from a young master as well as a testament to how much Akerman would go on to hone her craft in the coming years. —Gerry (Pro), Feb 10, 2024

That feels like the thing one would write about this. You don’t even need the subs to see that. And that the point is obvious doesn’t diminish it necessarily.

I’m sure a subbed version will surface eventually (in a place that I know how to find). Timing is everything.

So I’ve gone and hijacked this review and made it more about me (and the hunt for hard-to-find media, to a lesser degree). For this I apologize, but I will never apologize for dumping the hot pasta water through a strainer over the sink: a simple pleasure that’s only pleasureful so long as it’s not meant to represent centuries of repression by one gender onto another. We can either be the hot liquid, cascading down the drain on a mysterious adventure, or we can be the pasta, trapped in a colander, waiting to be devoured. And what do I have to thank for my ability to see this as a choice in the first place? Why, the patriarchy of course, which is why it must be dismantled, so that all of God’s can children are allowed to experience what it’s like to be water (and make terrible metaphors at will).

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,439 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,441 ⫸

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A young mother, alone with her daughter, confides in a friend who happens to be the director herself. Chantal Akerman, although she sympathizes with the mother, does not say a word. It was released on April 1, 1971.