Is That All There Is?

This final film from Lindsay Anderson, a self-portrait of the artist in old age, cannot help but draw comparisons, for me, with my recent viewing of Chantal Akerman's final film, also an autobiographical essay made in late-life, No Home Movie.

While Anderson lacks Akerman's aesthetic genius, this is a far bolder, more life-affirming work. Anderson conveys his simultaneous love of, and disappointment, with life through a series of semi-fictional encounters with real-life friends and family that are, nonetheless, clearly staged. The essay aspect comes from Anderson's juxtapositions of his own and confidant's "first-world problems" with those of the suffering masses of the Third World.

Akerman seems, by contrast, a more selfish, but also more honest artist. Her movie about watching her mother deteriorate and die is utterly self- focused, yet also mercilessly true. No one who watches it can think these are staged interactions. Akerman comes out compromised in one form or another too often for that to be the case.

Old Anderson has, perhaps, no one left to mourn. But he also clearly doesn't mourn himself so much as a world he was once a part of that is clearly headed in a very bad direction.