Artists' Artists: Angelica Mesiti

In a lonely interior, a man and a woman nurse drinks at separate tables. They’re like solitary strangers inside an Edward Hopper bar or a Vincente Minnelli Technicolor café. It’s a rigidly locked-off tableaux vivant. The man stubbornly sips his beer, while the woman is acutely aware of his every gesture. Are they strangers or intimates? Music from a passing car pans right to left. It’s the moment just before a dance sequence ruptures this prosaic scene and the fireworks of choreography explode.

He finishes his drink, gets up to leave. Jump cut. Now they’re swaying; it becomes a slow dance to a Véronique Sanson song playing on the jukebox. They clutch each other in a clinging, desperate, slightly deranged dance: the bastard child of Leslie Caron and Pina Bausch. Four years later, in 1986, the performance will be appropriated by Jim Jarmusch for a scene in Down By Law: Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi dance in a kitchen while Tom Waits sips coffee.

I realize where Akerman has brought me. She reinvented something I instinctively understood but couldn’t name and turned it inside out. The scene’s burnt into my brain.

^{Main image: Chantal Akerman, Toute une nuit (All One Night) 1982, film still. Courtesy: © The Estate of Chantal Akerman and Marian Goodman Gallery, London, New York and Paris}