‘Contact Lens’ Review: An Underwhelming Tribute to ‘Jeanne Dielman’ [Fantasia 2025]
Given that it was relatively underseen and under-discussed outside of France until the late ‘00s, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles rose to the top of the cinephile canon with remarkable speed. You don’t have to have seen Chantal Akerman’s simmering slow-cinema ode to feminine rage—recently deemed the best film of all time by Sight & Sound, as close to an official designation as film criticism gets—to follow the plot of Chinese filmmaker Lu Ruiqi’s debut feature. But that’s because the movie barely has one.
Beyond that, at least some familiarity with Akerman is highly recommended. Contact Lens is very much in conversation with the late Belgian filmmaker’s work, both in the special attention it pays to feminine labor and in the playful way that it approaches structure. Most of the film takes place within the cramped confines of a single-room studio apartment; there, a woman, nicknamed “Bubbles,” obsessively rewatches Jeanne Dielman—or, at least, a version of it—on a gigantic screen that takes up most of one wall.
Also Read: ‘Sham’ Review: Takashi Miike’s Latest Is A Stylish But Frustrating Courtroom Drama [Fantasia 2025]
She does so while engaging in her own domestic routines, which are meticulously documented through the sci-fi contrivance that gives the film its name. “When she put on her contact lenses, they recorded everything she saw,” a title card explains, a bit too late to make it all make sense. On the whole, the concept of the contacts remains frustratingly vague throughout, manifesting in gesture and metaphor and not much else. Don’t be misled: Contact Lens is a sci-fi movie in the same way that Jeanne Dielman is a horror film, which is to say only on a technicality and even then, just barely.
The relationship between Bubbles and her favorite movie is much more interesting. “I adopted this movie,” she tells a rare visitor to her apartment. “It’s a feral animal, like a cat.” Bubbles’ film is clearly meant to evoke Akerman’s, but with a twist: An Asian woman stands in for Delphine Seyring in Lu’s version, and its protagonist is stuck in her kitchen, smacking face-first against an invisible wall when she tries to get up and walk into another room.
Also Read: ‘Kazakh Scary Tales’ Review: Police Procedural Meets Folk Horror [Fantasia 2025]
Eventually, that wall evaporates, but not in the way one might expect; instead, it’s the wall between the film and the film-within-the-film that collapses, allowing both women to occupy the same space at the same time.
Contact Lens is a film for those who like their arthouse genre films 99% arthouse and 1% genre, who know the precise definition of “structuralism” and find repetitive rhythms hypnotic rather than boring. Slow cinema can be quite suspenseful if you give it a chance—after long periods of immersing yourself in nothing, the tiniest gestures can become downright thrilling. But if you’re not already on that wavelength, Contact Lens is not the film to convert you. Ironically, you know what is a perfect entrance point? Jeanne Dielman.
-
Contact Lens
Categorized: Reviews
