La captive 2000 Chantal Akerman directed and co-wrote the screenplay she describes as loosely based on Marcel Proust’s “La Prisoniere” (book five of “Remembrance of Things Past”) which is good to know as the film is austere in the extreme and requires a sympathetic attitude toward the depiction of an overpowering possessiveness by the central figure, Simon, a wealthy young man, and his perplexing willing captive, Ariane, who quietly acquiesces to his strange demands, while finding emotional and possibility sexual fulfillment with female friends in ill concealed subterfuge which Simon senses, driving him to spend his days shadowing Ariane and endlessly interrogating her and her friends. The question of Proust’s homosexuality and the extent it informs his novel is open ended it seems but Ackerman certainly falls on the side of those who might see Simon as a repressed homosexual as he shows evidence of being repulsed by Ariane’s femininity belying his words. The final sequence is unambiguous in that regards as the play of shadows on a sea side terrace make clear. This is the the play of deeply buried neuroses of both the central characters without a wisp of explication.