Distinguished by its restrained pace, long takes, and static camerawork, the film is a slice-of-life depiction of a widowed housewife (Delphine Seyrig) over three days.
During sex she again has an orgasm, then dresses herself, walks back to the bed where her client is relaxing, and stabs him to death with a pair of scissors.
After establishing herself as a major film director in 1974 with Je, tu, il, elle, Akerman said that she "felt ready to make a feature with more money" and applied for a grant from the Belgian government for financial support, submitting a script that Jane Clarke described as portraying "a rigorous regimen [constructed] around food ... and routine bought sex in the afternoon".
[5] Shooting Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles took five weeks and Akerman called it "a love film for my mother.
[6] Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles premiered in the Directors' Fortnight of the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.
[8] Jonathan Rosenbaum defended the film's length and pace, saying that it "needs its running time, for its subject is an epic one, and the overall sweep ... trains one to recognize and respond to fluctuations and nuances.
[5] B. Ruby Rich said that "never before was the materiality of woman's time in the home rendered so viscerally ... She invents a new language capable of transmitting truths previously unspoken".
[9][10] Critic Richard Brody called it a "tour de force of cinematic modernism [that] puts time onscreen as it was never seen before".
[14] With the release of the DVD edition by The Criterion Collection in 2009, the company held a contest that invited fans to create cooking videos inspired by the film, and to post them on YouTube.
The website's consensus reads: "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles offers a lingering, unvarnished, and ultimately mesmerizing look at one woman's existence.
[22] It is the fourth film to top the critics' poll after Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, and Vertigo, and the first directed by a woman to do so.