2 Mar 2023
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Closet Picks
The Palme d’Or–winning Belgian duo talk about their friends Jane Campion and Cristian Mungiu, a Krzysztof Kieślowski masterpiece that has influenced their own work, and the “profound loneliness” of Barbara Loden’s Wanda.
Filmed together, each with a page of their own: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne
Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com
This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  The Age of Innocence | Martin Scorsese | 1993 | |
| 2 |  3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman box set, 3 films | |||
| 3 |  An Angel at My Table | Jane Campion | 1990 | |
| 4 |  4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days | Cristian Mungiu | 2007 | |
| 5 |  Dekalog | Krzysztof Kieślowski | 1988 | |
| 6 |  Wanda | Barbara Loden | 1970 | |
| 7 |  Death of a Cyclist | Juan Antonio Bardem | 1955 |
How far across film history it reaches
The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.
How long this haul is
8 of its 9 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 15.2 hours. One of the others is a television series, which has no total on record at all: TMDB gives one episode's length, not a series'. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
What one of its choices was worth is not published for this visit. That figure divides the whole runtime by every choice, so a total missing one film would understate it rather than be approximately right.
How unusual this haul was
Its 7 choices had been taken by 7.29 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Death of a Cyclist, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Cristian Mungiu, through 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Cristian Mungiu, through 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.