La captive (2000) Reviews

• A radically different approach to Proust from Ruiz's 'Le Temps Retrouve'(spoiler in penultimate paragraph)

  the red duchess2000-12-05

  '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.

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• A magnificently subtle film

  runamokprods2010-06-05

  A quiet, intense, low key look at the dysfunctional relationship between a very rich young man and the young woman he 'keeps' at his house. Is she trapped or is he? Who's really the captive? Not much happens in terms of events, the film is mostly in the details, but those details are great. The two leads give amazingly subtle performances, and the photography and lighting – while never showy – are magnificent. One of the most interesting and effective 'cold' looks I've seen in a film. Beautiful compositions. A film for those interested in complexity of character, a director using image and mood to tell a story, and patience to allow the slow accumulation of details to add up over time to something very special.

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• La Captive is....captivating

  Rogue-322002-08-29

  Having recently discovered French actress Sylvie Testud when I saw The Chateau, I was interested in this film because she's in it. I haven't read the story that the film is supposedly based on so I had nothing to compare it to when I saw it and therefore I went in without any preconceived notions. And with a film like this, a film that doesn't operate on any conventional filmmaking level, that is a very good thing. This movie doesn't try to tell you what to think or feel about its characters; there is none of the contrivances so common in American movies, none of the manipulation. It just simply presents them and follows them and allows them to do what they do without the camera cutting away too soon for fear that the audience will get bored when there's not a lot "going on" in a scene - in fact some of the best scenes in the film have hardly any movement at all. And this is not done in a self-conscious, 'arty' let's-create-mood sort of way, which makes watching it - or rather experiencing it - even more hypnotic. This is a film that must be experienced more than once, I would say: you're not really sure what's transpired OR how you feel about what you've witnessed upon a first viewing because it doesn't hit all the 'buttons' that a commercial film is compelled to hit. And Testud is brilliant, managing to imply complexity without demonstrating it (if that makes sense) - she's beyond subtle, beyond sublime.

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• you have to read Proust

  ligonwd2005-04-19

  You have to read Proust to appreciate this movie. I imagine it was the most awful, boring treachery to subject someone to if they hadn't read La Captive. Ackerman is actually quite witty in portraying the mental restlessness of the characters, especially Ariane/Albertine constantly being caught in her poorly planned deceptions). In addition to this her visual portrayal of Proust's themes of desire and dissatisfaction are very poignant(although sometimes uncomfortable). An example being the bathing scene, where Simon/Marcel is most vulnerable and unselfishly sensual (I say unselfishly because of the contrast of the other sensual scenes where Ariane is sleeping) but this is only possible for him because of the distance and physical barrier between them. Ackerman is not entirely successful at putting Proust's La Captive on film, but she does make a beautiful, simplified attempt.

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• Does not draw us deeply enough into its mysteries

  howard.schumann2014-02-16

  Because of its complex and introspective nature, the works of the great French novelist Marcel Proust have been difficult to translate to the screen in spite of some very fine attempts by Raul Ruiz and others. Chantal Akerman's La Captive is no exception. Inspired by the fifth of seven volumes of Proust's epic novel In Search of Lost Time, the film captures the obsessive quality of the relationship between Simon (Stanislaus Merhar) and Ariane (Sylvie Testud) (Marcel and Albertine in the novel), but is unable to project onto the screen the novel's exquisite prose, psychological subtlety, or depth of feeling. While Simon is given a thoughtful treatment, he comes across more as strange and unpleasant than the deeply sensitive, poetic young man of the book. La Captive begins at home with Simon viewing films of Ariane and some friends during their summer together in Normandy. Repeatedly viewing the footage, he carefully utters the words "I really like you," but it is unclear if the sentiment is his, or if he is vocalizing what he imagines to be the thoughts of his mistress. Set in Paris, Akerman updates the story from its turn of the century milieu and transports it to the modern era with automobiles and well-lit boulevards filled with traffic replacing the horse and carriage. Simon is a somber, well-to-do young man who lives in an ornate Paris apartment with his grandmother (Francoise Bertin), housekeeper Francoise (Liliane Rovére), and girlfriend Ariane (Sylvie Testud). Though they claim to love each other, each keeps their distance. Ariane lives in an adjacent room and only comes to see Simon when he sends for her in an ongoing ritual. Dialogue is sparse and mostly consists of Simon asking Ariane questions that elicit noncommittal responses such as "if you like," "I can't say," or "you think so?" Mimicking Bressonian models, the actor's facial expressions range from enigmatic to blank, and, aside from some perfunctory kissing, the only time that passion shows up is when Simon rubs up against Ariane's body while she is asleep (or pretending to be). When Simon demands to know what Ariane is thinking, she replies, "If I had any thoughts, I'd tell you—but I don't." Some situations would be comical if they were not sad. As Simon watches Ariane from an adjoining bathroom while sitting in his tub, he tells her how much he admires the odors between her legs and says that if it weren't for his illnesses, he would rather that she would never wash. On another occasion, he probes to find out the number of lies she has told him, insisting that two lies are not enough, he wants at least four. The jealous and insecure Simon has accumulated evidence in his own mind that Ariane is physically attracted to women but it is not made clear (either in the novel or the film) whether his suspicions are real or imagined. Nonetheless, Simon is preoccupied by the part of Ariane's life that he believes she is withholding from him, following her in an art gallery and physically removing her from a performance of Carmen at the Trocadero out of his fear of her friendship with the actress Lea (Aurora Clément). When Simon is unable to leave the house because of an asthmatic condition, he assigns their mutual friend Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) to track her whereabouts and report back to him. He even goes so far as to question lovers Sarah (Bérénice Bejo) and Isabelle (Anna Mouglalis) about what they think about when they make love. Although the characterizations in La Captive are very real and quite haunting, the film covers only a small portion of Proust's fifth volume, omitting the colorful characters that make it so special: Charlus, Morel, the Verdurin's, Brichot, and Mme de Guermantes to name a few, and there is no hint of the music, society, and themes of memory, nature, and awareness of time and place that dominate the narrative. Though the pacing is deliberately slow to capture the enigmatic quality of the relationship, the film, while absorbing, is static and does not draw us deeply enough into its mysteries to compensate for its dramatic inertness.

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