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There’s a scene in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere, about the Belgian filmmaker’s Chantal Akerman’s life and work, where she discusses her only foray into commercial filmmaking, the William Hurt and Juliette Binoche vehicle, A Couch in New York She and Hurt butted heads (even in this short anecdote you can sense her quiet obstinacy, her absolute refusal to bow to Hurt’s celebrity); nobody saw it and those who did, didn’t like it; it was, by any metric, a failure Critics took issue with both the romantic and comedic aspects of the film – a problem for a romantic comedy Akerman handles it with trademark good humour There are no scores to settle here, no grievances to unload, although the viewer must understand, perhaps now more than ever, the intense private battles Akerman must have fought to survive as an artist Certainly, Akerman possessed the singular vision, marvellous self-sufficiency (she made her first film when she was eighteen; she made another in just one week), attention to detail, and strong will we idolise in male auteurs; traits, for example, more recently venerated in Quentin Tarantino The scene concludes with Akerman seated defiantly in a diner, refusing to be embarrassed or humiliated by the box-office takings of a film about an unlikely couple brought together by an apartment swap There’s a slight air of mischievousness about her, a mutinous part of her that finds it amusing that the film was made at all, that they actually allowed her to make it Well, what was her great failure? The truth is Akerman couldn’t, even if she tried, – and the punchline is she did try – make a dumb movie   My Mother Laughs isn’t a memoir — no sign of Jonas Mekas, no brief, holy appearance of Agnes Varda, hardly any reference to her film career It’s a further step in her complex self-representation project, which began in 1968 with the short