Akerman's debut feature, undertaken at the precocious age of twenty-three, casually and confidently subverts a number of cinematic conventions, from the three-act structure and the idea of confessional storytelling to even the most basic relationships between sound and image. The film's first act stays confined to a nondescript studio apartment where Akerman herself, playing a character presumably representing the titular "Je," lopes around in fixed long takes, her heart broken from the recent fallout of a relationship. The action is limited to her writing and rewriting of letters to her female lover (which Akerman reads in voiceover), her grief-binging on powdered sugar and her obsessive repositioning of the few pieces of furniture in her hovel, all of which poses an immediate challenge to any viewers with a low tolerance for visual and dramatic monotony. Finally, in step with the character's impatience, the film takes to the streets of Brussels, where she first hitchhikes with an unpleasant, sexually deprived trucker and subsequently finds her way to her ex-lover's apartment, where she then persists in coaxing a lovemaking session that's shown in lengthy real-time. The journey suggests an erotic picaresque, but one shorn by Akerman's compositional distance and chiaroscuro lighting of any vicarious pleasure in the heroine's escapades.