La Captive (The Captive)

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  May 17, 2008

  Dracula787

  One of those sexually explicit art house films the French love to make. This is quite possibly one of the most boring, pretentious, uninspired films I have ever seen. Absolutely nothing happens over the running time of this film, it?s literally just a guy following his girlfriend...( read more) around for two hours. No one in this film acts like an actual human being, they behave like odd robots that exist to make whatever the hell kind of point the director thinks he?s making by deliberately putting the audience to sleep with his plodding non-cinematic style. I?m really open minded about experimental work, but my patience was at an end by halfway through this thing. I even found myself fast-forwarding through parts of the second hour. If I had seen this in the theater I would have walked out after 45 minutes and I would have missed nothing. This is exactly the kind of pretentious bullshit that gives art films a bad name.

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  April 14, 2009

  Budgeburgess

  Loosely based on a work by Proust, this is a film which rapidly dissolves into obscurity and enigmatic pretensions. A rich, effete, dilettante young man is obsessed by his skinny (almost anorexic) girlfriend. He doesn't work, he doesn't have to. Occasionally, he does some transla...( read more)tion of literary texts ... when he can be bothered. The sole purpose for his pampered, purposeless, passionless life seems to be his obsession. He's loathe to let her out of his sight unless accompanied by another, equally slim, young woman and without, apparently, the further chaperone of a camera.
  
  He keeps his captive in his house, she is invited to visit his bed from time to time, but his sexual contact is adolescent, premature, and entirely self-centred. He is obsessed. But what does she appear to gain from the relationship? She lives a life of idleness and ennui. Deciding which dress to wear is the most exciting and most challenging thing she will do in the day. She certainly does not appear to be captive. Somehow, she has captivated him, and he is the one trapped by the nature of his obsession.
  
  Quite frankly, it's a film in which I could not identify with any of the characters, could not sympathise with any of them, and in no way wished to sympathise with any of them. Obsession is a fascinating subject for literary or cinematic enquiry. Obsession, here, takes place in such an extraordinary and unreal a setting as to make it trivial and unbelievable. Obsession becomes transparently the vehicle for a story which otherwise has no substance, and the absurdity of the setting robs the vehicle of any drive or direction.
  
  In the end, you want to be charitable and decide that this is not pretentious drivel, and then wonder if you are trapped in your own intellectual pretensions and are extending too much weight and significance to this film because it's French? If it had been an American or a British movie, I would have been instantly more scathing. Because it's French, I looked for greater depth, sophistication and significance. Ultimately, therefore, I won't be charitable - this is pretentious drivel!

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  March 8, 2009

  jjb3332003

  Not much good or bad here; a bit painful watching his controlling obsessiveness and her furtive lieing; an excellent original classical score.

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  February 2, 2009

  Phonex

  An outwardly fragile and introspective man named Simon (Stanislas Merhar) stands in a darkened room poring over an audioless film footage of a group of holiday revelers at a seaside resort in Normandy. Repeatedly cueing the film to the excerpt of a beautiful young woman, Ariane (...( read more)Sylvie Testud) and a friend, Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) overlooking the beach, Simon attempts to decipher Ariane's passing comment, concluding that her inaudible articulation to an unseen, off-camera listener must have been "I really like you". The enigmatic and curiously alienated prologue provides an insightful, yet forbidding glimpse into the relationship between the reclusive Simon and his lover Ariane: an obsession that is also manifested in the image of Simon trailing behind the oblivious Ariane as she drives alone to a secluded residential hotel (in a slow, labyrinthine pursuit that pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo). Relegated to a life indoors due to chronic allergies and the entrusted care of a frail, elderly grandmother (Françoise Bertin), Simon has brought the seemingly acquiescent Ariane into his suffocating, insular household where he has furnished an adjacent room for her so that he may summon her at his discretion (deriving profound intimacy from observing her sleep), and has made arrangements with Andrée, an accommodating and trustworthy mutual friend (and reliable spy), to accompany her on brief excursions into town to stave off boredom and restlessness. However, as Simon becomes increasingly suspicious of Ariane's time consuming personal activities and mystified by her complacent inscrutability, he embarks on a consuming and ultimately destructive quest to possess his elusive lover completely.
  
  Perhaps the most Bressonian of Chantal Akerman's minimalist and dedramatized cinema (most notably, in the bookend structure and psychological deconstruction of A Gentle Woman), La Captive is an elegantly sinuous and provocative exploration of obsession, madness, and intimacy. Although inspired by Marcel Proust's La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of his epic masterwork In Search of Lost Time, Akerman distills the lush texturality and baroque elements of Proust to create a spare and essential portrait that nevertheless retains the thematic density and emotional ambiguity of the psychological novel. From the estranged opening sequence as Simon studies a celluloid image and speaks for a silent and physically absent Ariane, Akerman establishes the film's subjective point of view and implicit objectification of - and control over - a voiceless (or more appropriately, silenced) Ariane. Visually, Akerman further reflects Simon's literal projection of Ariane through disorienting images of converging and diverging shadows cast on anonymous streets and an unfinished alabaster sculpture at an empty museum that represents both idealized perfection and dimensional incompletion. Moreover, Simon's perception of Ariane's untenable opacity is subsequently illustrated through an oddly distanced, non-coital sexual encounter between Simon and an unconscious Ariane - her impenetrable thoughts occluded by sleep. 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.

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• Stanislas Merhar
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