La Captive (The Captive). 2000. Belgium/France. Directed by Chantal Akerman. creenplay by Akerman, Eric de Kuyper. With Stanislas Merhar, Sylvie Testud, Olivia Bonamy, Liliane Rovère. Restored in 4K by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK in collaboration with Fondation Chantal Akerman, from the original 35mm negative, grading supervised by director of photography Sabine Lancelin; DCP courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 118 min.
From whence does jealousy spring? Chantal Akerman’s erotic, contemporary reimagining of Le Captive, the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, opens with the flux of ocean waves and a home movie of young women on the beach. Suddenly, in the here and now, we are transported to the bourgeois Parisian apartment where Simon and Ariane live in a gilded cage of obsession and deceit. Ariane leads a double life, keeping the company of women who remain inaccessible to Simon, and however much she pleases him or eases his pain, she is a cipher. Furtive glances are exchanged, sensual odors described, exquisite pleasures held in torturous abeyance. “I’m burning to know what goes on between women that doesn’t between a man and a woman,” he confesses. Akerman had long wanted to adapt Proust, ever since she made Jeanne Dielman in 1975: “It was the first time I’d read such a treatment of female homosexuality in a book. Proust writes, at one point, something like: ‘I can’t fight against it.’ He doesn't denigrate it, doesn’t portray it as secondary or intended for male pleasure.”