Features: DVD
From acclaimed director Chantal Akerman and inspired by Proust's La Prisonniere, La Captive is an elegant meditation on desire, obsession, love, and possession.Handsome, elegantly dressed, and hopelessly neurotic, Simon Levy (Stanislas Merhar) lives in a labyrinthine, half-renovated Paris flat with his ailing grandmother (Francoise Bertin), faithful family servant (Lilane Rovere), and Ariane Rey (Sylvie Testud), the object of his unquenchable desire. Simon is obsessed with Ariane and keeps her as his willing captive. She tolerates his elaborate desires, his endless interrogations and surveillance. Still, Ariane is able to maintain her own reserve of privacy, her own mental and physical freedom. Although often affectionate to Simon, Ariane prefers women and so leads a double life. But this only magnifies Simon's pain until his obsessive desires culminate in devastation and tragedy.
"...the film is a contemporary surrealist masterpiece and Akerman's most fully realized feature since Jeanne Dielman..." Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
"A gently captivating, deceptively austere work." David Wood, BBC
"Akerman playfully grounds her film in cinematic traditions by including resonant references to that other masterpiece of masochistic obsession, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo." TV Guide
Editor's Note
The fifth volume of Marcel Proust's legendary novel REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST is the source for veteran French feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman's remarkable film LA CAPTIVE. Following a theme common in her past films--the impossibility of true knowledge of the other, Akerman crafts a severe and stilted chamber drama out of Proust's evocative and poetic text. Simon (Stansilas Merhar) is a wealthy and sensitive French man living in a posh, if cloistered, life in Paris. Ariane (Sylvie Testud) is Simon's lover and constant companion, as well as the subject of his irritated obsessions. Not satisfied with merely loving Ariane, Simon aches to have absolute knowledge of her-- her past, her present, her thoughts, and her deeds. When having her accompanied at every moment does not satisfy him, Simon begins to follow her everywhere she goes, questioning acquaintances, and constructing elaborate fictions around her every action. Suspecting her of a secret life filled with love for other women and a true happiness to which he is not privileged, Simon attempts to penetrate Ariane's aloof and opaque façade, only to bring their impossible love to a breaking point. Akerman's tight and constrained style, assisted by stylized acting, creates a complex and compelling portrait of the tragedy inherent in love.
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