Critics reviews

Akerman makes Proust’s novel of male sexual jealousy entirely her own—indeed, it bears thematic similarities with the director’s early feature JE TU IL ELLE. The film also suggests a fusion of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Albert Brooks’ MODERN ROMANCE in its alternately brooding and comic depiction of obsessive behavior.

Akerman painfully transmits the condition of captivity—being held by another’s gaze and scrutiny to the point of madness, and being locked out of it too, sensing one’s invisibility and, ultimately, the agonizing precariousness of love. In La Captive, whose final scene faintly echoes the romantic fatalism of so many literary and film heroines . . . only death robs the gaze of its suffocating power.

I believe it remains the greatest of screen adaptations of Proust in part because if the liberties it takes with the source material, liberties that enable Akerman to more fully engage the psychological and philosophical uniqueness of Proust's work... It's a very mordantly funny film; the sexual jealousy of its lead character is no less maniacal and toxic than that of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, but its articulation is so restrained and refined as to evoke a different kind of mortification.

I was struck from the second scene—in effect, a car chase, in which a young man (Stanislas Merhar) follows a young woman to what he suspects is a romantic assignation—by Akerman's ingenious assimilation of a rich array of cinematic influences, and, in particular, by her transformation of a work of literature into a cinematic work that refracts, with a distinctive modernism, a particular genre, namely, melodrama.

One of the finest literary adaptations ever made, Chantal Akerman's La Captive (2000) distills La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of Marcel Proust's sprawling In Search of Lost Time, to a spare, inventive rumination on the author's key themes: jealousy and possession.

In one of the most beautiful scenes of the film, Akerman turns the lay-out of a luxurious bathroom into a complex apparatus of torture, desire and estrangement. Ariane and Simon bathe together, but in different spaces. They talk to each other, but they can't touch... While the fort-da game staged by Akerman is alluring on a visual level, her masterfully orchestrated sound-track is the real torture chamber in which Simon is trapped. Silence and noise are equally oppressive.

By presenting psychological interiority through an overarching narrative circularity and incorporating visually austere and oppressively isolating landscapes, Akerman creates a haunting and irresolvable odyssey of possession, passion, disconnection, and myopia.

A considerable departure for Akerman: not only her first truly literary film, but perhaps the one that works best in narrative terms. Inspired by the Albertine story that consumes two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past and coscripted by Dutch filmmaker Eric de Kuyper, this is ultimately a better Proust adaptation than Raul Ruiz's Time Regained, despiteor maybe because ofthe fact that it's much freer, even to the point of altering plot and providing a feminist critique of the original.

Pared in the Bressonian manner, but inflected with an almost operatic intensity, the film transcends/eschews naturalism to create an almost timeless parable about the deadeningly obsessive/possessive perversities of many male-female relationships. The use of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead is particularly effective.

Few things are more pathological than Simon badgering Ariane to tell him her lies so that he can rewrite the past in terms of "real memories." The breakup—as dogged and excruciating as everything else—takes its dialogue from Proust but feels like Vertigo once more. Akerman has fashioned a great negative love story, a long stare into the abyss of the night.

The film is a contemporary surrealist masterpiece and Akerman's most fully realized feature since Jeanne Dielman. Somber in tone but punctuated with hilariously absurd details, it has, from beginning to end, the quality and logic of a dream—or of a fantasy spun by the protagonist as he lies in bed, writing in his notebook à la Proust.