La captive

EN

“Asked why she had returned, in La Captive (2000), to her rigorous apartment compositions, Akerman indicates that she did not have to go very far: "It is the mother", she says, smiling. The opening sentence of Molloy – "I am in my mother’s room" – becomes in Akerman’s work: "I am in a room next to my mother’s". Hearing how domestic images of her mother and aunt at the kitchen are imprinted on her memory, one understands that the protected but suffocating space of the home is the first object for testing creative autonomy.”

Dominique Païni1

“[...] one could argue that Jeanne Dielman’s “comfort” is strictly a matter of her keeping an encroaching sense of panic at bay through her compulsive routines – a feeling of panic that eventually overtakes and engulfs her. There are of course many other exceptions or variations to my formula that could be found in Akerman’s work: [...] The frightening entrapments of La captive (2000), loosely derived from Proust’s La prisonnière and Albertine disparue (as well as evoking, more indirectly, Bresson’s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne through its contemporary setting that evokes the past, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo through its hypnotic, obsessional intensity), may have more to do with brains and feelings than with rooms.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum2

“Plagued by allergies and asthma, Simon is unable to accompany Ariane when she goes out, but, suspecting her of loving women, spies on her and relentlessly questions her to find out if she’s ‘lying’ to him. What unsettles him, ultimately, is the enigma of femininity. What is a woman? and which mystery is hidden when two women are together? Proust explores the masculine side of the question, probably transposing his own anxieties – what hidden pleasures could his (male) lover find with a woman? Conversely, in most of her films, especially those with a (semi)-autobiographical resonance (Je tu il elle, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles), Akerman portrays women who desire both men and women, developing, however, a more intimate bond with the latter. For a female director, the challenge posed by an adaptation of the Proustian text is that Marcel is constructed as the subject of desire – who acts upon it, obsesses about it, suffers from it – and Albertine is its unfathomable object. While both Sylvie Testud’s outstanding performance and Akerman’s peerless direction give Ariane a complex subjectivity and agency, what she does off-screen and what she thinks remain a mystery. Is it because the effects of female authorship are not powerful enough to dispel the “active/passive heterosexual division of labour” uncovered at the core of film narrative by Laura Mulvey: “woman as image, man as the bearer of the look”? Or is a more interesting (transgressive) structure at work here: a woman attempting to look at another woman who loves women through the eyes of a man who tortures himself by trying to understand female homosexuality from the inside? Threatened by the contiguity /continuity between two female bodies that the homosexual bond entails, the boundary between two individuals can nevertheless be restored by the introduction of a third term, intervening from the other side of the gender line.”

Bérénice Reynaud3

• 1Dominique Pain, "Conversation: Chantal Akerman and Dominique Païni." On La Captive. DVD. Directed by Chantal Akerman. Artificial Eye, 2004.
• 2Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Chantal Akerman: The Integrity of Exile and the Everyday", jonathanrosenbaum.net, May 25 2022. As originally published in Retrospektive Chantal Akerman (2011), a publication of the Viennale/Austrian Filmmuseum, and the second issue of the online magazine Lola, 2012.
• 3Bérénice Reynaud, "Alluring Absence: La Captive", Senses of Cinema, April 2004.