Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the '60s in Brussels
1994 · Chantal Akerman
For a reflective evening when you want to remember what being fifteen actually felt like — restless, talkative, secretly in love. A quiet film for a quiet mood; nothing here shouts.
What it's about
Brussels, April 1968: fifteen-year-old Michèle tears up her school papers, skips class, and spends a single day adrift in the city — a movie matinee, a chance meeting with a young French army deserter, long wandering talks about death and desire, and underneath it all her unresolved feelings for her best friend Danielle. One day, one girl, one city on the edge of revolution.
The experience
Intimate and unhurried, all long walks and closer-than-comfortable conversation — it feels less like watching a story than shadowing someone through the most charged day of her adolescence. Tender, a little aching, and quietly romantic.
The craft
Chantal Akerman shoots in long walking takes at close range, letting talk and city and period pop songs carry the hour; made for a French TV series in which directors revisited their own adolescence, it's her most openly autobiographical fiction. Small in scale, precise in every frame.
Why it matters
A jewel of Akerman's filmography that has grown in stature as her work has been rediscovered, and a touchstone for the intimate, walking-and-talking strain of coming-of-age cinema.
April 1968: fifteen-year-old Michèle tears up her school papers, skips class, and spends a day drifting through Brussels — a matinee, a chance meeting with a young French deserter, long talks about death and desire, and beneath it all her unresolved feelings for her best friend Danielle. Chantal Akerman made this hour-long film for the French television series 'Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge,' which asked directors to revisit their adolescence, complete with a party scene and period songs — the same commission that yielded Assayas's Cold Water. Akerman, the Belgian director whose Jeanne Dielman remade what film narration could be, answered with her most openly autobiographical fiction: walking-and-talking long takes, a city traversed on foot, revolution rumbling just offscreen and a girl's inner life given the full weight of history. Once nearly impossible to see, it circulated for years as a whispered-about treasure, its final party — two girls dancing to Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne' — among the tenderest scenes Akerman ever filmed.
Lines of influence
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) — Akerman's own template of real-time durational observation in fixed long takes, letting a woman's small gestures and dead-time accumulate meaning without dramatic underlining.
- Je, tu, il, elle (1974) — Her first-person autobiographical mode filming her own body and queer desire in clinical, unhurried long takes — the self-portrait grammar the 1994 film revives.
- Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978) — The solitary young woman traversing European stations, streets and transient rooms in static long takes, punctuated by frank confessional encounters.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — Autobiographical adolescence built from truancy and roaming the city on foot, holding on the teenager's face until intimacy replaces plot.
- Masculin Féminin (1966) — Late-60s youth as 'children of Marx and Coca-Cola,' with politics kept offscreen while jukebox period-pop scores café conversations about love and death.
- Bande à part (1964) — The spontaneous café dance interlude that stops the narrative for pure embodied youth — the direct forebear of Akerman's party-dance set piece.
- Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) — A near-real-time single-day structure trailing a young woman walking the city on foot with mortality and desire pressing at the edges of the frame.
- L'Eclisse (1962) — Temps mort and desultory city walking in which desire dissipates into architecture and empty space — the durational dead-time Akerman absorbed.
- Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds) (1994) — Commissioned for the same 'Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge' TV series: queer adolescent awakening at a political moment, scored to period songs.
- US Go Home (1994) — Same Arte series, staging a single night of teenage desire around a house-party dance to 1960s rock 45s spun end to end.
- Travolta et moi (1994) — Same commission and brief — first infatuation filtered through period pop-music reverie in the director's remembered youth.
- Trop de bonheur (1994) — Another entry in the same series, observing restless teenagers in loose, near-documentary long takes over a compressed span of time.
- Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) (2007) — Patient observational staging of inarticulate queer adolescent longing among girls, meaning carried by held looks rather than dialogue.
- Girlhood (Bande de filles) (2014) — The extended, uninterrupted party dance to a pop anthem as an expression of collective adolescent selfhood — a direct extension of Akerman's dance-floor scene.
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) — Sciamma's avowedly Akerman-indebted study of a young woman built on the female gaze and queer desire, even sharing the 'portrait' framing device.
- Morvern Callar (2002) — A young woman drifting through days scored by the pop songs on her headphones, mood and desire-and-death built through durational aimlessness over incident.
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