What to Stream: A Rediscovered Short by—and Starring—Chantal Akerman

The free streaming site Le Cinéma Club, which offers one film each week, has followed its spectacular rediscovery of Claire Denis’s 1991 short film “Keep It For Yourself” with something peculiarly similar yet wondrously distinctive: “Family Business,” a short film from 1984 by Chantal Akerman, in which she also stars.

The seventeen-minute film is a tour de force of comedy, both physical and verbal, about the variety of indignities that the movie business inflicts on its eager and earnest participants. It’s also a dazzling bit of multilevel metafictional whimsy. Akerman portrays herself travelling to Los Angeles with a real-life colleague, Marilyn Watelet, and Watelet’s young son, Leslie Vandermeulen, in quest of financing for an English-language musical Akerman wrote, called “Golden Eighties.” Losing hope in the industry, she’s looking for a wealthy uncle who lives there—and who, like her mother, is a Polish-Jewish immigrant. The search leads them to a house in a suburb, where Akerman is welcomed by two women.

One of those women is the real-life French actress Aurore Clément (the star of Akerman’s quasi-autobiographical 1978 drama “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna”), who is hoping to launch her acting career in Hollywood and is expecting the arrival of an accent coach to help her with the script she’s rehearsing (which just happens to be the one that Akerman wrote for “Golden Eighties”). The ensuing game of false pretenses and misapprehensions leads to an ingenious sequence in which Akerman channels Peter Sellers’s accentuated antics along with a bit of Groucho Marx’s scabrous arrogance. There’s a hint of Buster Keaton’s romanticism in Akerman’s shtick, a hint of Jacques Tati in her gestural geometry—it’s an amateur actor’s performance built with a filmmaker’s movie-love plus a self-scrutinizing, self-revealing artist’s sense of risk and exposure.

“Family Business” is also a work of graceful yet severe precision, distilling a wide range of experience into a tautly compressed style. It conjures comedic pathos and candor through the power of its pictorial compositions, the alternation of angles and rhythms of editing, and the repetition of actions in a sort of dramatic rhyme. Akerman, who died in 2015, is one of the pioneers of the personal cinema, of the candid refraction of first-person experience into drama, into documentary—and into audacious reconceptions of these cinematic forms themselves. She began her career—in 1968, at the age of eighteen—with a short film, “Saute Ma Ville,” in which she starred, front and center, onscreen alone. Her last film, “No Home Movie,” is a nonfiction film about her relationship with her elderly and ailing mother. In between, she created a body of work that’s among the most original, the most inventive in the history of cinema. The only thing that prevents her from being even more celebrated is the extraordinary and dire unavailability here, whether on home video or streaming, of many of her best films—a group that we now know includes “Family Business.”

Stream “Family Business” on Le Cinéma Club.