Family Business: Chantal Akerman Speaks About Film

MOVIE #2,228 • SCORE 6/10 • 12.19.24
SERIES: ALBERT & AKERMAN

Interestingly enough, this is the second film related to Akerman’s feature Golden Eighties (in that we see an actress Aurore Clément — Anna of The Meetings of Anna — read dialogue from that script in a faux audition), which is still three movies away chronologically. Whereas, THE Eighties was more or less a straight making of that film to come, this is a short fictional work made for UK TV in which, once again, Chantal steps in front of the camera to do some ‘acting’. Per Le Cinéma Club, this is a

little-known and gently satirical short comedy of confusion. Akerman plays a fictionalized version of herself – freshly landed in bewildering, sunny Los Angeles and on the hunt for financing via a rich but elusive American uncle – with childlike grace and perfect comic timing. “Charlie Chaplin, that’s me,” she would later say of Family Business, which reveals her love of early film comedy, the Hollywood dream machine, and of underdogs. [SOURCE]

I would wholeheartedly disagree that she possesses “perfect comic timing” unless one’s definition of that is “awkwardly delivering every line of dialogue” in between shyly retreating from the camera’s gaze at increasingly frequent intervals. Humor, at least in its simplest form (as the conceit here suggests) is definitely not her strong suit. It’s nevertheless intriguing, as this has to be the most ‘acting/mugging’ that Akerman herself has ever done…


If you can get on its satirical wavelength, then this is fine, but I wasn’t really amused. But that’s Hollywood, baby…

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A short about filmmaking, financing, acting, and why all of these things are, at heart, totally absurd. It was released on September 25, 1984.