I rewatched this last night as a 'treat' for my wife. (The treat was a cosy night in:
Jeanne Dielman was the price I exacted.) I figured there was a 70% chance she'd love it and a 30% chance she'd run screaming from the room. Fortunately, it was the former.
She tuned into the ritual and routine immediately (half an hour in, she made the wonderful comment: "I wish I was like her: organized") and immediately noticed when things started to slip. The film really is wonderfully suspenseful, a movie where "don't forget to fold up the newspaper and put it in the cupboard!" takes the place of "don't go back into the haunted house!"
For those keeping score, she had no idea about the ending - or even that there was going to be an 'ending' - and
was genuinely shocked in the moment, but thought it was a bit of a cheap gimmick immediately afterwards.
She also noticed something right away that I'd never noticed before and will now never be able to un-notice. I'll do two consecutive spoilers here. The first one indicates what it is in general terms, the second one goes into more detail. Don't click on either of these if you've never seen the film, because it's likely to distract you completely from the main action. If you've seen the film, proceed with caution.
The Mystery of Jeanne Dielman's Kitchen Chairs
In some shots there are two chairs, on either side of the table; in others there's only one, on the sink side. This starts in the very first scenes in the kitchen (cleaning the shoes - one chair; takes shoes into living room / dining room / second bedroom; returns to kitchen - two chairs). I assumed there was some kind of elision here, and the chair would subsequently be revealed to have an alibi, but the inconsistency persists throughout the film, that right-hand chair vanishing momentarily in sequences which seem to be relatively contiguous, with no potential explanation of where it might have gone, and not many places for it to hide in such a cramped flat!
Any sensible theories welcomed, but I'm pretty sure it's just a simple continuity error, probably caused from not remembering to replace the chair when they would have had to remove it for the shots where the camera is taking its place (i.e. the across-table shots like those represented on the Criterion cover.
Something else I noticed this time around was a small but crucial element of causality. Whatever happens to her when she fucks Jacques Doniol-Valcroze does
not precipitate the breakdown in her routine. That is, she doesn't start making mistakes because of some psychic disturbance that takes place during that encounter, be it an orgasm, a rape or whatever. The routine has already been disrupted because that encounter took much longer than usual, and the potatoes have been overcooked (not burnt, as she later comments that she could have mashed them, but didn't because that would have screwed with her OCD in another way by disrupting her regimented weekly menu, which called for mashed potatoes the following evening). It's the overcooking of the potatoes that causes a chain reaction that really disrupts her routine: she has to start the potatoes from scratch, doesn't have any, has to go out for more, which makes their evening meal and subsequent outing later than usual, and possibly also contributes to her radical temporal disruption the following day, making her daily rounds far earlier or later than usual. I'm glad to have noticed this, because it puts more causal weight on the character's existing, oppressive OCD than on the more sensational (and, I find, more than a little silly) Oh-My-God-She-Had-Her-First-Orgasm-And-Can't-Handle-It! explanation that Akerman seems to favour in later interviews. The two 'explanations' aren't mutually exclusive, and they're both about a woman who keeps her life formidably controlled losing control through no fault of her own.