Between Les Rendez-vous d’Anna and Demain on Déménage: m(o)ther inscriptions in two films by Chantal Akerman

Demain on Déménage is a gloriously comic queering of reproduction that claims as its foundation heterosexual sexuality and the stability of the hetero-normative unit of the couple. Akerman's decision to cast Aurore Clément in the role of a mother in Demain on Déménage, over two decades after playing a daughter in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, encourages a reading of the 2005 film as a reprise of concerns first explored in 1978. If Les Rendez-vous d'Anna has moments in common with Lee Edelman's uncompromisingly provocative polemic against the ideology of 'reproductive futurism', this paper argues that Demain on Déménage figures the 'matrixial' movement Bracha Ettinger theorises as opening on to a different concept of futurity, symbolised not in post-natal terms by the child or the mother, but rather as a corporeal- psychic imprint of the 'originary prenatal encounter event, with-in pregnancy' common to all human beings, which offers another model of communal relations