“It’s not gonna be as easy as one, two, three.”

Taking inspiration from Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Cody Clarke’s Rehearsals is an ode to the mundanities of everyday life. Clarke takes Akerman’s dispassionate, voyeuristic gaze and refracts it through the lens of a pseudo-documentary that sees no less than sixteen actresses inhabit the daily rituals of a single fictional character, each playing a different aspect of the woman in the same way that the cast of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There took turns depicting the various facets of Bob Dylan’s persona.¹

Rehearsals must be approached as a work of experimental cinema, else one will find themselves immediately frustrated by the lack of conventional markers of narrative cinema. Much of the film consists of vaguely-realized fly-on-the-wall vignettes in which the various actresses mindlessly trudge through their daily rituals: reading, eating, sleeping, showering, brushing teeth, combing hair, painting nails, preparing food, relaxing in the park, exercising, cloud watching, playing with the cat, browsing the web. A few of them—the only ones who have any lines to speak at all—practice the scenes that they are auditioning for and one even interacts with the director, who is off screen. Others pursue passions such as drawing or guitar.

While the concept is intriguing enough—“a day in the life” of a struggling actress—Rehearsals deliberately downplays any potential excitement, depicting the actress’s life as one marked by vanity and drabness. This shared life is absurdly bland and unremarkable in almost every respect, to such a degree that one cannot mistake the director’s intention in depicting so. And so it must be the case that the film isn’t built for commercial appeal, but to provoke some kind of insight in the viewer, who might find a contemplative springboard in the interstitial moments where the actress gazes up into the clouds or sits at the dining room table in the nude.

That last note segues nicely to an interesting paradox that arises: that Clarke has cast only women in his film and depicts the feminine aspects of their daily existence, and yet chooses to frame them in an overtly sexualized manner. This seems like a similarly intentional, self-aware decision, as if the exploitative shots of boobs and butts and midsections and legs are a comment rather than the result of an unaware male gaze.

Shot on the cheap and simply made, Rehearsals is a film that sounds enticing in the abstract, and occasionally flashes fulfillment of its promise, but if its goal is indeed to render the humdrum fascinating in the way of Akerman, it doesn’t quite succeed.

1. The actresses that appear in the film are Anna Fikhman, Ellie Aaron, Trine Boode-Peterson, Zelda Knapp, Jillene Anzanetta, Emelia Benoit-Lavelle, Marguerite Einhorn, Maya Azbel, Kristina Karyakina, Danielle Lenore, Sarah Teed, Tonianne Druckman, Danielia Maximillian, Merrin Lazyan, Brooke Ivy-Prussin, and Maya Gilbert.