Romance is just a series of opened and closed doors. What a beautiful film. I appreciated it more and more as it went on.

Chantal Akerman seems to put into practice lessons learned from her voyeuristic New York output in Toute une nuit (A Whole Night - although a better translation would have been Quite a Night, since we never see sunset and the third act is all morning), in which her camera intersects with the lives (and mostly love lives) of dozens of characters during a summer night in Brussels. Very little dialog, engaging the audience's imaginations to fill in the blanks, either with experience or digested love stories, of these beginnings, middles and endings. We eventually do return to some of the characters in the back end, but on a single viewing, it's not always easy to tie both ends of their story together, and perhaps unnecessary. All these fragments create a picture of loneliness, sometimes as a driving force for the relationships - physical contact often translates as awkward clinging for dear life - or as, simply, itself. That's not meant to be a cynical take. There's a real yearning quality to the film, and it's therefore hopeful.