Set largely in train stations, hotels and taxicabs, Les Rendez-vous d'Anna is a film locked in a spatiotemporal limbo, a pointed departure from the fixed domesticity of Jeanne Dielman. The story's rootlessness is inspired by Akerman's own as a filmmaker enjoying relative international renown in the mid seventies, and her titular heroine—a taciturn director on a border-crossing trip to Cologne to attend a screening of her work— functions transparently as self-portraiture. That Anna's most emotionally charged rendez-vous, among a handful of less fulfilling interactions dramatized over the course of the film, occurs with her mother during a brief stopover in her hometown of Brussels, makes the connection especially palpable and lends the film its harrowing interplay between Anna's inchoate longing for independence and her equally persuasive need for familial comforts. At once a damning exploration of collective European existential malaise post-WWII, a quietly wrenching coming-out drama, and a haunting purgatorial tour of anonymous metropolitan spaces (each photographed with breathtaking formal precision by Jean Penzer), Les Rendez-vous d'Anna is Akerman's confident first step into more conventional narrative territory.