The Israeli desert in No Home Movie (Toronto International Film Festival)

Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie places her mother in the center, but the film’s real star is death. It hangs ever present over the movie, making itself felt more acutely in the sad light of the filmmaker’s recent presumed suicide, days before she was scheduled to present this film at the New York Film Festival. Her film reminds us that although each of us is special and that love and memories connect us, death silently waits to swallow us all. The confusing mix of calm, sadness, and onscreen suffering that the film arouses in response to this cold fact can be almost too much to bear.

Akerman sets up a dual structure. In low-resolution video with her signature long takes, she films her conversations with her elderly mother in her mom’s Brussels apartment and records their chats over Skype. “I’m filming this to show there is no distance in the world,” Akerman says, a notion that delights the older woman.

But there is distance. Akerman cuts from interiors to a series of exterior shots whose emptiness and desolation contrast with the interiors’ intimacy. Deserts careen by. Trees and grass bend in the wind—in the film’s opening take, one tree takes a beating for almost four minutes. The pull between inside and outside aches with unspoken tension.

In the apartment, interactions with Akerman’s mother provide moments of poignant connection, and their small talk and deeper reminiscences are absorbing. Natalia Akerman emerges as a dignified, kind woman, inclined to give others the benefit of the doubt, affectionate not just with her kin but with the caretakers who attend to her needs, and always respectful of her daughter’s high spirits and intelligence.

Death has left its mark on Madame Akerman; she and her husband survived the Holocaust, but just barely, and her brush with fate seems to have given her a sturdy, philosophical outlook on life. Is it unfair to ask whether that attitude might have helped her daughter stay alive? No Home Movie pulses with such uneasy thoughts.

The camera glides over Madame Akerman’s home and possessions, giving us a nonverbal sense of who she is through an intensely observed personal environment. Formality and bibelots vie with aimless clutter. Noise and barely glimpsed sights on the street outside imply that whether we exist or not, the world and life proceed in indifference. Madame Akerman clings to life, daily taking her all-important walks. When she leaves the apartment, the camera stays focused in the empty room, empty temporarily but soon to be empty for good.

Quiet heartbreak seeps in as this vital woman fades. At one point, she nods off to sleep in a chair, and Akerman and her sister try to keep her awake and engaged with humor and baby talk. She struggles to respond, but we can see she is just about checked out. The daughters’ attempts to reach her, well-meaning as they are, seem almost cruel. Maybe no one said it better than John Cougar Mellencamp: “Oh yeah, life goes on/long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.”

Some of life’s cruelty bares its teeth in the exterior shots. The camera pans over the gray Israeli desert out of a car window, first steadily and then crazily jerking back and forth, creating a mood of desperate flight. Overmiked takes of harsh ambient audio provoke first discomfort, then resentment. It’s easy to see why Akerman was such a polarizing artist in her long career. These scenes feel like guilt, or punishment.

Close to the end, we see water captured in a tight frame. As she films, Akerman’s silhouette is reflected on its surface. The water moves calmly, with a graceful rhythm, and I found myself wishing that the filmmaker had felt some calm and beauty in those few moments. Rest in peace, Chantal Ackerman.