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Silly me to think I could master so nuanced a work of art as Chantal Akerman's film La Captive in two or three viewings. The words I first jotted down on my notepad were “possessive love, masochism, perversion.” On another viewing, I added “passive aggressive, neurasthenic, and obsession” to describe Simon Levy's (Stanislas Merhar) character and “submissive lover, caged” of his treatment of Ariane (Sylvie Testud). I wrote “geisha-esque” as one of my descriptors for Ariane.
Oh, it is about that, in part, but the film is so much more complex and ambiguous. Like an M.C. Escher lithograph, it appears first this way from one vantage point, and then that from another — a figure-ground sensitivity depending upon perspective. Who is liberated? Who is captive? Who is free? Who is possessed?
At 15, Belgian minimalist filmmaker Chantal Akerman determined to be a director after watching Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou . At 25 she wrote and directed her best known film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a provocative, experimental work that runs over three hours, shot in real time and, mostly, in interior spaces with long, slow takes, concerning three days in the mundane routine and gesture of an “ordinary” housewife and mother — ordinary, that is, other than her work as a prostitute.
Inspired by La Prisonniere [The Prisoner], Proust's fifth volume in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu [Remembrance of Things Past ], Akerman sets La Captive in the 1970s. Simon lives with his grandmother (Francoise Bertin) in a large, richly appointed Paris apartment along with his girlfriend, Ariane, and their long-time housekeeper (Liliane Rovere).
As we will learn, music is an important signifier for Akerman. She doesn't manipulate through music. Absent throughout much of the film, it is a call to attention when she introduces it. As the opening credits roll, we hear