Inlands by Elin Willows // Je Tu Il Elle dir. by Chantel Akerman

In the first part of Chantal Akerman's three part film, Je Tu Il Elle (1974), a woman stays in her room and eats a bag of sugar with her fingers. There is no else but her.

This is 'Je' of Je Tu Il Elle.

                                       

Time no longer matters to her, to someone so alone in a room. It simply falls away. The woman eats more sugar. She lies on her mattress. She looks out the window. Days, maybe weeks pass. Eventually, she drafts a letter to someone, an ex-girlfriend and there it is - her solitude, this room, the bag of sugar - her break-up and the entire mood of it.

Inlands, published by Nordisk Books and written by Elin Willows, is a novel that reads like the 'Je' in Chantal Akerman's film. Here too, is a woman and her break-up. Time is let go, so it passes. Alone, in a room, in a grocery store, in a hotel bar, in a northern Swedish village, inland, surrounded by mountains and forest.

The woman in Inlands is more subject to change of season. Her village is located so close to the Arctic Circle, her winters are submerged in darkness and her summers, light. She moves between these seasons, in this way, time lapses through her, non-linear, tired and lethargic. Her life is reduced and there is no stress, only sequenced routines that happen by themselves. Days, months and years come and go.

The woman works at a grocery store, she sits and drinks coffee on her break, reads the newspaper and talks about a murder mystery show. She sometimes goes for walks and looks at the surrounding nature. She buys sweets (her bag of sugar) from a village vendor and later eats them all in bed. She watches lots of TV. She goes out on a Saturday night to a hotel and drinks. She tries to get away from everyone and prefers to sit quietly in a basement, alone with a stuffed trophy bear.

Inlands and Je Tu Il Elle have the same particular repetitiveness, the dullness and exhaustion of women going through break-ups. Both create singular worlds that are suspended and cut off from everything else. But where Chantal Akerman films it, Elin Willlows writes it down:

There are so many different realities. My life now has nothing to do with my previous life. What I experience here, which almost no one back home can understand. But nobody here either. He who once knew everything but now knows nothing. That which is outwardly visible which maybe some people, a few, manage to notice when I move amongst them. But that which is my life isolated from everything else.

Unlike Je Tu Il Elle, Inlands remains insular, never spilling into the lives of others. The woman simply stays alone. And though it is nostalgic of Akerman, it is bolder in the way she observes her own grief, in moments of time that remain hers - a tribute to her interior life.