A contemporary review
La Captive is a film like no other currently on London’s screens, but if the director’s name, Chantal Akerman, puts you in mind of an avant-garde, confrontationally feminist cinema from the past, you’d be wrong this time. Similarly, if the fact that La Captive is another Proust adaptation made in the wake of Raul Ruiz’s magisterial Le Temps retrouvé with the same producer, Paolo Branco, prompts you to expect more Visconti-like opulence and moving scenery, such preconceptions should be banished. La Captive does explore territory that once nourished many auteurs – the very borders between sexual obsession, dream logic and madness where Hitchcock and Buñuel plied their trade but it now seems Akerman’s alone.
All the autobiography and deconstruction we’ve come to expect of Akerman since her 1975 breakthrough feature Jeanne Dielmann 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles are here subsumed to the cause of creating a truly cinematic world of allure, distraction and unknowing. And it may match a new mood in the director herself: ‘I forget how difficult I used to be. I see some people in the industry and I say hello and they ignore me because they still remember I was obnoxious 20 years ago.’
La Captive adapts the section of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu titled La Prisonnière, in which Proust’s well-born narrator Marcel describes his tortuous relationship with his live-in mistress Albertine. To himself Marcel professes his indifference to his mistress, but outwardly he behaves with extreme jealous possessiveness. The obsessive lover in Akerman’s film is Simon, a very rich young man of the present day. He not only uses a mutual female friend Andrée to spy on and chaperone his girlfriend Ariane, he himself follows Ariane like a stalker. His jealousy of Ariane’s female friends (some of whom are almost certainly her lovers) is more pronounced than in Proust. Simon wants to know not just ‘what goes on’ between women, but what they’re thinking, and the unattainability of his girlfriend’s mind is compounded only by the unattainability of the lesbian worldview.
La Captive opens with amateur film footage of the Normandy-beach frolics of Ariane, Andrée and several other women on holiday together, who all display a communal air of closed-off intimacy, a collective Gioconda smile. At one moment Ariane, a wiry, freckled presence, looks directly at the camera as if challenging the audience to discover who she is. Then we find out that the silent amateur film is being projected by Simon, and that he’s trying to lip-read what Ariane is saying as she stands next to Andrée. ‘I like you very much,’ is his conclusion. Cut to Ariane in a summer dress and high heels striding confidently through a near-deserted Place Vendòme in Paris. She’s being watched as she gets into her open-top Mercedes by Simon, in the driving seat of his Rolls. As we see her move off from Simon’s viewpoint and the Rolls follows behind, the shooting style reminds us irresistibly of police detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) tailing Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak – whose character is undoubtedly named with Proust in mind) through the streets of San Francisco in Vertigo, especially as the orchestral music swells: a doom-laden, watery piece by Rachmaninov, The Isle of the Dead, that’s highly reminiscent of Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann. Soon Simon is following Ariane at a distance as she climbs one of the steep stairways of Montmartre. The click-clack of her determined progress is in stark contrast with Simon’s entranced silence – he seems to glide with his arms fixed at his sides, like a Magritte figure floating through a De Chirico Paris. But when he reaches the hotel he’s seen Ariane enter and the receptionist tells him she’s booked a room for her aunt, not for herself, we’re thrown into another surrealist’s arms – those of Buñuel and his discreetly charming but bewildered bourgeoisie.
It would be all too easy to over-emphasise the myriad influences here, which amount to nothing more than a drinking in of cinema on Akerman’s part. What’s completely unique is La Captive’s extraordinary sense of time. As Ariane explores an art museum under Simon’s gaze, the tension is excruciating. Ariane’s heels clomp on the wooden floorboards as she strides through the exhibits, seemingly in real time, while Simon’s slower steps only make the floor groan and creak. The elastic time frame of this ridiculous bout of hide-and-seek is typically dreamlike. It’s clear Ariane must know what Simon gets up to and it may be part of the game they play in which sex can occur only after he’s pretended to do something else and she’s fallen asleep. You could widen that out and suggest that his suspicions of her lesbianism are equally part of their rituals and that without them the obsession would disappear.
You can read it either way, especially as Akerman makes sure her film always puts us in Simon’s position. Though he’s a shit who behaves as if he owns Ariane – in one scene he even drags her away from an opera-house reception without the slightest nod towards social niceties – the women do all seem as if they’re lying to him. Andrée – his supposed confidante and Ariane’s chaperone – is also number-one suspect as Ariane’s lover (while Simon dry-humps her sleeping form, Ariane calls out Andrée’s name). These dualities all contribute to the feeling of a work of pure cinema, one that doesn’t give up its meanings in the first reel, or even at the first screening. In portraying the enigma of woman from a man’s point of view, Akerman successfully reveals the real enigma of the unknowability of any human being to another. And of course Simon, with his obsession and his pollen allergies (which seem analogous to post-coital disgust), is as much of a captive of his own imagination as Ariane.
Nick James, Sight and Sound, May 2001
LA CAPTIVE (THE CAPTIVE)
Director: Chantal Akerman
©/Production Companies: Gémini Films, Arte France Cinéma
Production Company: Paradise Films
With the participation of: Canal+, Centre national de la cinématographie, Gimages 3
Producer: Paulo Branco
In Charge of Production: Elisabeth Bocquet
Production Manager: Antoine Beau
Unit Production Manager: Guillaume Roitfeld
Unit Manager: Antoine Moussault
Production Unit Manager: Hacéne Belkhedra
Location Manager: Thierry Golitin
Pre/Post-production Supervisors: Elisabeth Bocquet, Marielle Duigou, Marilyn Watelet
1st Assistant Director: Paolo Trotta
2nd Assistant Directors: Renaud Gonzalez, Michèle Massé
Script Supervisor: Agathe Sallaberry
Casting Director: Richard Rousseau
Casting: Marion Touitou
Screenplay: Chantal Akerman, Eric de Kuyper
Inspired by ‘La Prisonnière’ by: Marcel Proust
Director of Photography: Sabine Lancelin
Editor: Claire Atherton
Art Director: Christian Marti
Set Decorator: Janou Shammas
Costume Designer: Nathalie du Roscoät
Costumer: Claire Gérard-Hirne
Wardrobe: Christian Castandet
Key Make-up: Annouchka
Hairdressers: Pierre Chavialle, Gérald Portenart
Titles/Opticals: Arane
Sound: Thierry de Halleux
Mixer: Stéphane Thiébaut
Studio Recordist: Éric Ferret
Supervising Sound Editor: Catherine de Loof
Sound Effects: Nicolas Becker
Stunts: Catherine Robert, Stéphane Boulay
Cast
Stanislas Merhar (Simon)
Sylvie Testud (Ariane)
Olivia Bonamy (Andrée)
Liliane Rovère (Françoise)
Françoise Bertin (grandmother)
Aurore Clément (Léa)
Vanessa Larré (Hélène)
Samuel Tasinaje (Levy)
Jean Borodine (chauffeur)
Anna Mouglalis (Isabelle)
Bérénice Béjo (Sarah)
Adeline Chaudron (prostitute in the woods)
Sophie Assante (singing woman)
Christopher Gendreau (bellboy)
Sébastien Haddouk, Xavier Morange (painters)
Stanislas Januskiewicz (maître d’hotel)
Laurence Guillet (receptionist)
Pascal Erizabal (hotel porter)
Claude Hermann (voice on radio)
Caroline Roucoule, Gersende Dufromontel, Elodie Marteau-Laurent, Karine Demilo, Pia Vuorinen, A-Sophie Morillon (young girls)
France-Belgium 2000©
118 mins
Digital 4K (restoration)
In partnership with
All restorations by Royal Film Archive of Belgium (CINEMATEK) and Fondation Chantal Akerman unless otherwise stated.
Season generously supported by Philippe & Stephanie Camu.
Supported by the General Representation of Wallonia-Brussels in the United Kingdom.
With thanks to Céline Brouwez, Fondation Chantal Akerman; Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts, A Nos Amours.
Chantal Akerman Collection Vol.1: 1967-1978 (Limited Edition 5-Disc Blu-ray Box Set)
Spanning the period 1967 to 1978, and representing the first significant release of Chantal Akerman’s work in the UK, this 5-Blu-ray set includes her most famous film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Available from BFI Shop from 24 February.
Sight and Sound presents the auteurs series: Chantal Akerman
Revisiting material from the Sight and Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin archive and also publishing exclusive texts and images from the Fondation Chantal Akerman archive, Sight and Sound presents the auteurs series: Chantal Akerman. Available now from BFI Shop.
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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