Delphine Seyrig first met Chantal Akerman as a jury member of the film festival that would award a prize to Akerman’s experimental short film Hotel Monterey (1972). The veteran actress, who was beginning to define herself as an activist and becoming increasingly involved in the activities of the French feminist movement, made it a point to collaborate with female directors, and the prodigious young Akerman, who was only twenty-four at the time of Jeanne Dielman’s production, was a natural partner. Much has been written about the significance of the film, Akerman’s breakthrough—for one, its pioneering use of duration to express one marginalized woman’s lived reality—but somewhat less considered is its place within Seyrig’s own artistic evolution. Here, the actress breaks from her image as an ethereal enchantress, and despite delivering a largely wordless performance (as in Last Year at Marienbad), she brilliantly conveys her character’s tightly coiled interior. Controlled to a fault, Jeanne is a woman on the edge whose manicured existence only works to conceal her inner chaos and hurt