La Captive (2000)
Directed by Chantal Akerman

Film Review

Jealousy is a demon that cannot be exorcised.  So claims Marcel Proust in La Prisonnière (The Captive), the fifth volume of his monolithic À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).  Proust's famous tome (which runs to one and half million words - twice the length of the Bible) is renowned for being practically unadaptable for stage or screen, but in her loose adaptation of The Captive the acclaimed Belgian film director Chantal Akerman fulfils the task admirably and offers up a portrait of obsessive love that is compelling, personal and remarkably true to its literary source.  With its tragicomic portrayal of a young man's doomed attempt to fully possess the object of his desire (destroying his love in the process) La Captive comes steeped in a bitter irony that forces us to reflect on what a truly cruel, delicate and complicated thing romantic love is.  It is a thoughtfully written and masterfully crafted piece of film art which reaffirms Akerman's well-deserved standing as one of the world's most accomplished auteur filmmakers - possibly her best work since her widely acknowledged masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

Like the long, chapterless novel on which it is based, La Captive is a challenge when you first come to it, but if you willingly surrender yourself to its peculiar subdued charm and mysterious poetry, the effect is both profound and intensely revelatory.  There have been two other notable attempts so far to bring Proust's In Search of Lost Time to the big screen - Volker Schlöndorff's Un amour de Swann (1984) (a glossy production starring Jeremy Irons and Alain Delon) and Raoul Ruiz's Le Temps retrouvé (1998) (a dreamlike patchwork quilt of a film that is a struggle to unravel).  Lacking the grandeur and self-conscious artistry of these earlier films, Akerman's austere Proust adaptation is far more satisfying and much closer to the spirit and intent of the original novel, although it does require a greater level of commitment from the spectator.  It is hard to believe that Akerman made this, her most sombre and profound work, between two rare excursions into light comedy - Un divan à New York (1996) and Demain on déménage (2004).

There is nothing new in the idea that obsessive love can become a torment capable of destroying both the subject and the object of an unattainable desire.  Ambrose Bierce's 1892 novella The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter shows how even the most chaste and virtuous of individuals can succumb to this particular human failing.  In her film Akerman takes this basic theme and develops it into a deeply unsettling exploration of the human soul, a fantastic voyage that is harrowingly familiar to anyone willing to go along with it.  As Proust put it: 'Love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety'.  The exquisite pain of a love that is slowly devouring itself is felt in every moment of La Captive, an impression that is sustained by the stark languorous atmosphere which pervades the film, helped by the haunting melancholy of a soundtrack that is dominated by recurring snatches from Rachmaninoff's The Isle of the Dead and Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata.

The glacially voyeuristic visual style of cinematography that Akerman employs throughout is clearly borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), which offers a similar tale of a man's obsessive pursuit of his ideal woman.  Long continuous tracking shots follow the male protagonist Simon across an oppressively noirish Paris as he is lured by instincts he cannot control in his determination to fully possess the woman for whom he has developed the most morbid of fixations.  For him the staccato tapping of high-heeled shoes on concrete pavements and wooden floors draws him on like the song of the siren.  And yet all the time, the thing he craves stays just out of his reach - a goal that is forever unattainable. L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, Que nul ne peut apprivoiser - to quote one well-known opera.   Love flies on and on, like a bird that has no intention of becoming a prisoner.

Simon's obsession takes on a distinctly Kafkaesque edge as it develops into an all-consuming, uncontrollable paranoia, fuelled by speculative notions that his girlfriend Ariane may be pursuing a torrid lesbian love affair without his knowledge.  The motivating reason for the young writer's preoccupation with Ariane's secret love life becomes harder to account for when it becomes clear that his own affair with Ariane is so manifestly lacking in outward signs of romantic feeling and carnal interest.  The only thing that appears capable of arousing Simon's virtually undetectable libido is the sound of his girlfriend's heavy breathing in her sleep - it stirs him like the gentle sighing of the sea.   And even then normal copulation is out of the question.  Gratification comes as a brief mechanical ritual, with Simon lying on top of his apparently dozing paramour, both fully attired in their usual nightwear.  Once the biological function is complete (in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea), Ariane dutifully gets up and goes back to her own room.  There is seemingly no love or passion in the relationship - just two people slavishly going through the motions of being a couple.  It isn't his girlfriend's body Simon seeks to possess - he already has that and apparently has little use for it.  Clearly what he is after is her soul, her entire inner being - and this is the thing he can never have.  Simon's craving has gone way beyond love and has mutated into the nastiest kind of addiction, and like all other addictions it is without reason and limit.

The fact that Simon is an intelligent, well-educated and sensitive adult makes his obsessive behaviour appear all the more bizarre.  In his novel, Proust comments: 'We love only what we do not wholly possess'.  Simon is wise enough to know the truth of this and yet he still persists in trying to own Ariane to the fullest extent.  The writer's motives are so tangled and contradictory that we can have no hope of rationalising his actions.  Love has diminished his reasoning faculties to the point that he soon comes to resemble a chronically short-sighted mouse lost in a maze, a mindless thing driven by one overriding instinct - to totally absorb into himself another human being. This is love in its grimly demeaning terminal stage - a sickness and a torment.

The perverse nature of the couple's relationship is most apparent to us in the stand-out sequence in which Simon lies in his bath whilst Ariane takes a shower in an adjacent room connected with his by a large frosted window.  The lovers have no difficulty carrying on a conversation but they can barely see each other through the window and physical contact is of course impossible.  As a statement of the amicable, mutually accepted estrangement to which Simon and Ariane have become habituated this scene could hardly be more explicit.  Akerman's decision to shoot the entire scene is a single, painfully long static take exacerbates the degree of separation between the two individuals - almost to the point of farce.  Simon and Ariane are not only divided by a wall of glass.  There is no emotional or spiritual connection between them at all.  They may live in the same apartment but they are already leading separate, unconnected lives.  It is habit, not love, that chains these two unhappy singletons together.

Stanislas Merhar and Sylvie Testud are perfect choices for the roles of Simon and Ariane, easily identified with the absurdly ill-matched characters in Proust's novel (The Narrator and Albertine) on which they are closely based.  Merhar, an incredibly subtle and quietly enigmatic young actor, had already distinguished himself in Anne Fontaine's Nettoyage à sec (1997), the debut role that won him the Most Promising Actor César.  His naturally aristocratic bearing and meticulously controlled performance make Simon the archetypal aloof intellectual stricken with an almost autistic inability to connect with his inner feelings and show real emotion.  How quickly does he come to resemble a Josef K. type who becomes hopelessly enmeshed in the nightmare experience that he creates for himself.  It takes us no time at all for us to realise that he is the captive of the film's title - the prisoner of his own paranoid delusions.  Testud, by contrast, is the untamed, untameable free spirit, who remains something of an enigma because so little is revealed about her inner nature.  Like Simon, we see Ariane only as we choose to see her - we have no idea who she really is or why she allows herself to become attached to an excessively needy man who, judging by his actions, is clearly half the way down the road to the funny farm.

The only occasion when Ariane's real identity comes close to being revealed to us is when, one evening, she spontaneously joins in a duet from Mozart's Così fan tutte, singing along with a young woman in a neighbouring apartment.  It is not apparent whether the two women can see each other, and yet they achieve a close, intimate connection, of the kind that Ariane patently does not have with Simon.  For Simon, this is naturally conclusive proof that his girlfriend is a lesbian, as well as irrefutable evidence that there is something between women that no man can ever know.  An awkward interview with a pair of lesbian friends of Ariane confirms his suspicions in this vein, without making him any the wiser as to what it is that a woman can share with another woman but not with a man.  Perhaps if Simon had taken the trouble to watch some of Akerman's other films dealing with female sexuality - Je, tu, il, elle (1974) and Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (1994) - he might have had some inkling as to what makes women tick.  But Belgian female-oriented cinema is not something the writer appears to have any interest in, so he carries on with his futile chauvinistic quest, too arrogant or too naive to accept the obvious fact that a man can never know everything about a woman.  Viewed in this light, La Captive becomes a black comedy of the darkest and driest kind.

Like Albertine in Proust's novel, Simon's concept of Ariane as 'a thing to be possessed' is shown to be nothing more than a pure chimera - a fantasy that exists only in the writer's own warped, infantile imagination.   In one reading of the film, it is possible that Ariane doesn't even exist in the real world - she could conceivably be just a fictional construct living in the mind of a man who is incapable of pursuing a normal relationship with anyone.  The film ends with a dramatic dive into the abyss in which Simon is forced to accept that he has lost Ariane for good.  Did she commit suicide after realising their relationship was doomed, as Simon seems to think.  Or did she merely wink out of existence, the demon finally exorcised once the writer found he no longer had any further use of her?

Film Synopsis

Simon is a cultivated young writer who is morbidly obsessed with knowing everything about his girlfriend Ariane.  Even though they cohabit, living in adjacent rooms in a large Parisian apartment belonging to Simon's grandmother, they seem unable to connect fully.  The problem is that Ariane insists on keeping a part of her life a secret from her lover, but this merely has the effect of aggravating his paranoid jealousy.  Keeping his girlfriend a virtual captive in his elegant Paris apartment is not enough for Simon and he is soon tailing her across town, so eager is he to know where she goes during the day when she is not with him.  He is soon convinced that Ariane has a secret lover - maybe a female lover - and her reluctance to share with him her most intimate secrets causes him greater pain and resentment.

In the end, Simon can no longer bear the torment he has created for himself and he insists that they separate.  For him love is impossible if the object of his love continues concealing things from him.  Ariane agrees to Simon's request, although she has no desire to end the affair and sees nothing wrong in lovers having secrets from each other.  Just as Ariane is about to move back into her aunt's home in the country, Simon has a sudden change of heart and persuades her to remain with him.  As they make the return trip to Paris, the couple stop for the night at a seaside hotel.  As Simon orders a meal, Ariane leaves the hotel without a word.  Fearing the worst, the writer hurries down to the beach and frantically swims out to sea.  Some time later, Simon is saved from drowning by a passing boat, but as he nears the shore he knows that he has lost Ariane forever.