Brussels on Film // Chantal Akerman's Toute Une Nuit

Last week, briefly, a nondescript apartment building in central Brussels became the most famous address in cinema. On December 1, Sight and Sound magazine announced that Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Brussels-born director Chantal Akerman had won their greatest film of all time poll. Akerman was the first woman (and also the first Bruxellois) to top the poll, run every 10 years, for her three-hour long study of the daily routine of a Brussels widow. But even before the film’s coronation by Sight and Sound, Brussels was already experiencing a minor Akerman revival; in October, Cinematek - the royal Belgian film archive - issued a restored edition of another of Akerman’s films. Toute Une Nuit was originally released in 1982, and this 40th anniversary remaster was accompanied by a programme of talks, walking tours, and other screenings throughout Belgium.

Both films are set in Brussels; but where Jeanne Dielman happens almost exclusively inside the eponymous lead’s Brussels apartment, Toute Une Nuit takes in the whole of the city. From the first frames, it is very obviously a Brussels film - from the spire of the town hall and the noisy yellow trams, to the ubiquitous presence of cars and the ever-present rumble of background traffic. It is not a linear film, and there is little (read: no) plot, and less dialogue; maybe 100 words are spoken, often in hurried, breathy tones, throughout the film’s 90 minutes. 

Toute Une Nuit is instead a series of disconnected fragments of a muggy night in Brussels. In fact, it appears to be a film about insomniacs and romantics sweating in various parts of the city. There is a lot of dramatic hugging, characters dance in empty rooms to Italian disco ballads, and its latter half largely revolves around people sitting next to open windows listening to thunder and the street below

Akerman described Toute Une Nuit as “a film about Brussels” in which she wanted to show the “incestuous” city inhabited by her close circle of friends. This meant the schools she went to, the old tea rooms she visited with her mother, living rooms, bedrooms, the back seat of cars - and the cafés they drank in, where several early scenes are set. In one fragment a woman sits alone at a table ignoring a half-drunk pintje in front of her, while men play pool under harsh strip lighting behind her. A man and a woman - it’s unclear whether they know each other - sit on a banquette in silence before knocking their beers off the table and making a sudden dash for the exit. An off-barman and, presumably, his girlfriend, dance to a jukebox playing Italian electro balades to an empty bar.

Akerman said that she wanted people to be able to “listen” to the frames as much as look at them. The film’s café scenes are this, but they are also tactile. You can smell the overstuffed ashtrays and half-drunk glasses of stale beer. You can feel the stickiness of the scuffed linoleum floor, and the roughness of the polyester cushions, in patterns that remind me of the furniture of my grandparents. The white formica tables are chipped, the plaster is flaking off the walls, and the single-paned windows stickered with adverts for long-defunct breweries like Leopold and Eylenbosch are smudged with grime.

Akerman’s cafés are sparsely populated, with barely a barman in sight, utilitarian and unromantic. They are recognisable but unfamiliar; it’s hard to place either the interiors or the facades in today’s Brussels, and even if you could guess correctly which bars Akerman might have filmed in, it’s unlikely they are still around today in anything like their 1982 incarnation. 

The Brussels captured by Akerman’s camera was in a bad place, suffering the ill-effects of deindustrialisation, white flight, and predacious developers. The director said it reminded her of New York, and both cities still had a way to go before they experienced an urban revival. Urbanist and architect Géry Leloutre, who ran one of the Akerman-themed tours, speaking to L’Echo newspaper in the film’s release said she “perfectly illustrates the beginning of the 1980s in Brussels. Urbanistically, the city is at its lowest. Dilapidated neighbourhoods in the city centre, the omnipresence of the car.” 

You can see that decay in the cafés too; everything looks so flimsy, exhausted, like it was going to collapse in on itself at any moment. The old Brussels was dying, and in the new one’s struggle to be born many of these cafés were abandoned to dereliction if they weren’t repurposed into something else or traded their authenticity for tourist cash or retro cool. There are still a few earthy places in central Brussels - places like the Brasserie de la Poste on Rue de Laeken - but they are a rare breed, and the working class drinkers and Akerman’s lovers have disappeared too, to neighbourhoods beyond the Vijfhoek. 

The working class communities that replaced them found, by and large, that they didn’t have much need of these cafés, and Akerman herself prefigures this changing Brussels in one of the film’s earliest scenes, when a female character leaves her apartment and walks past a café the windows of which are foggy with cigarette smoke. Beyond the men stood outside an open door, you can see groups of men huddled around small tables with cups of coffee playing cards to what sounds a little like Rebetiko, and as the woman turns to get into a waiting taxi there is graffiti in Turkish on the wall next door.