'La Captive' is, above all, a detective story. It opens, in scenes reminiscent of 'Vertigo', with a man following the movements of a woman later revealed to be his lover. It actually opens with him looking at her in a home video as she sits on the beach with her friend Andree. He tries to make out what she's saying, and the whole film is his attempt to read and interpret this woman, this so-called captive (the next book in Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' is called 'The Fugitive').
The first word he says, though, as he watches this video, is 'je', 'I', and this is the crux of the mystery. Is he reading her with too much 'I', too much subjective misinterpretation, to the point where her personality is literally squeezed to nothing (her name is changed from Proust's Albertine to Ariane = a rien), vanishing from the film? Or is it her 'I' that Simon tries to solve, as he sets himself the impossible task of fully possessing, fully knowing another person? Who is Ariane's 'je vous aime bien' referring to - Simon or her friend sitting beside her? The title refers to a female captive, but the real prisoner here is Simon, wandering in a labyrinth of jealousy, suspicions, half-clues and lies.
When a great filmmaker films a great book, it is instructive to note what she has left out as much as she leaves in. 'La Prisonniere' (why the name change?) is the fifth book in Proust's giant novel, but those thousands of pages of Proustian backstory are absent, the tortured obsession of the narrator with Albertine, his alarmed discovery of different sexualities (repressing his own?), his past (no madeleines here!), his desires, his art, his self-justifications. Indeed, where Ruiz's 'Le Temps Retrouve' is as close to Proustian FULLNESS as we are likely to get, 'La Captive' is Proust without the Proust. Set in a sort of timeless present (modern dress, period locations and mores), where Proust glides in a liberated chronology, 'La Captive' discards tastes, smells, music, comedy, society (no Charlus!), nature, time.
Proust's 'La Captive' is on one level even more suffocating than this film, filled largely with the agonisings and imaginings in the head of one man who never leaves his room - are Simon's wanderings here mental peregrinations, explaining the film's air of unreality? About halfway through the book, the reader is given blessed relief with a 100-page musical soiree, which opens it from the private to the public, the analytic to the observational, the tragic to the comic. This is completely absent here, as Akerman goes for a relentless narrative of cat-and-mouse jealousy reminiscent of Chabrol's 'L'Enfer', pushed so solemnly that it eventually becomes comic.
Similarly, the underlying, organising motif of the book, music, linking the narrator's awareness and transcendence of his locale, his memories of his past, his ideals for art, and Albertine, are mostly gone, making the film much more austere, and also minimising Albertine/Ariane (one exception is the beautiful sequence where Albertine and a neighbour , both birds behind cages, sing 'Cosi Fan Tutti' (women are all like that - captives?) to each other from their balconies, a breath of fresh air in their stifling lives, from another tale (like 'Vertigo' of women subjected to dangerous and repressive male jealousy).
It seems strange that Akerman should choose to follow Proust's narrative trajectory, emphasising mad male obsessiveness, rather than somehow rescuing Albertine, who is as indistinct here - as an ephemeral construct in Simon's mind - as in the book. Even her final gesture of liberation is denied, with the suggestion that Simon has killed her, his 'I' literally submerging her in the beach from which, in that opening video, she emerged.
Akerman's procedures are very similar to those of d'Oliveira's 'La Lettre', another transposing of an alien past to modern dress, where the cultural codes are not adapted, and hence jar, making us ask questions about the director's seemingly capricious intentions. The incongruity between the glossy imagery and the austere narrative creates a compelling mystery beyond that of plot, also reminiscent of Phillipe Garrel's 'Le vent de la nuit'. Still, I'll take Proust or Ruiz anyday. Pseuds may be interested to know that one of the machinistes was a certain Christian Metz.
The first word he says, though, as he watches this video, is 'je', 'I', and this is the crux of the mystery. Is he reading her with too much 'I', too much subjective misinterpretation, to the point where her personality is literally squeezed to nothing (her name is changed from Proust's Albertine to Ariane = a rien), vanishing from the film? Or is it her 'I' that Simon tries to solve, as he sets himself the impossible task of fully possessing, fully knowing another person? Who is Ariane's 'je vous aime bien' referring to - Simon or her friend sitting beside her? The title refers to a female captive, but the real prisoner here is Simon, wandering in a labyrinth of jealousy, suspicions, half-clues and lies.
When a great filmmaker films a great book, it is instructive to note what she has left out as much as she leaves in. 'La Prisonniere' (why the name change?) is the fifth book in Proust's giant novel, but those thousands of pages of Proustian backstory are absent, the tortured obsession of the narrator with Albertine, his alarmed discovery of different sexualities (repressing his own?), his past (no madeleines here!), his desires, his art, his self-justifications. Indeed, where Ruiz's 'Le Temps Retrouve' is as close to Proustian FULLNESS as we are likely to get, 'La Captive' is Proust without the Proust. Set in a sort of timeless present (modern dress, period locations and mores), where Proust glides in a liberated chronology, 'La Captive' discards tastes, smells, music, comedy, society (no Charlus!), nature, time.
Proust's 'La Captive' is on one level even more suffocating than this film, filled largely with the agonisings and imaginings in the head of one man who never leaves his room - are Simon's wanderings here mental peregrinations, explaining the film's air of unreality? About halfway through the book, the reader is given blessed relief with a 100-page musical soiree, which opens it from the private to the public, the analytic to the observational, the tragic to the comic. This is completely absent here, as Akerman goes for a relentless narrative of cat-and-mouse jealousy reminiscent of Chabrol's 'L'Enfer', pushed so solemnly that it eventually becomes comic.
Similarly, the underlying, organising motif of the book, music, linking the narrator's awareness and transcendence of his locale, his memories of his past, his ideals for art, and Albertine, are mostly gone, making the film much more austere, and also minimising Albertine/Ariane (one exception is the beautiful sequence where Albertine and a neighbour , both birds behind cages, sing 'Cosi Fan Tutti' (women are all like that - captives?) to each other from their balconies, a breath of fresh air in their stifling lives, from another tale (like 'Vertigo' of women subjected to dangerous and repressive male jealousy).
It seems strange that Akerman should choose to follow Proust's narrative trajectory, emphasising mad male obsessiveness, rather than somehow rescuing Albertine, who is as indistinct here - as an ephemeral construct in Simon's mind - as in the book. Even her final gesture of liberation is denied, with the suggestion that Simon has killed her, his 'I' literally submerging her in the beach from which, in that opening video, she emerged.
Akerman's procedures are very similar to those of d'Oliveira's 'La Lettre', another transposing of an alien past to modern dress, where the cultural codes are not adapted, and hence jar, making us ask questions about the director's seemingly capricious intentions. The incongruity between the glossy imagery and the austere narrative creates a compelling mystery beyond that of plot, also reminiscent of Phillipe Garrel's 'Le vent de la nuit'. Still, I'll take Proust or Ruiz anyday. Pseuds may be interested to know that one of the machinistes was a certain Christian Metz.