Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is a film so beautiful, so intense, and so claustrophobic that it is well-nigh unbearable. I mean this as unambiguous praise. La Captive is an adaptation of Proust–it is based on La Prisonniere, the section of A la recherche du temps perdu that narrates the narrator’s obsessive love for Albertine. And Akerman’s film is fully worthy of its source. Everything in La Captive is understated and underplayed: the lover’s jealousy, his efforts at surveillance, his relentless interrogation of the beloved, and her blankness and pliability. But this understatement is precisely right for the somber, nocturnal mood that is being depicted–love as a delirious possessiveness, doomed to impossibility, the attempt to possess a shadow, not merely another empirical person, but that person’s very otherness and mystery. It’s like trying to grasp the wind, or the darkness, in your two hands. Akerman conveys this, above all, through the rhythm, the temporality, of her film. This is a time that stops running, that turns back on itself, that keeps you waiting: not emptiness exactly, but the time of an anticipation that can never be fulfilled by presence.
La Captive
Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is a film so beautiful, so intense, and so claustrophobic that it is well-nigh unbearable. I mean this as unambiguous praise. La Captive is an adaptation of Proust–it is based on La Prisonniere, the section of A la recherche du temps perdu that narrates the narrator’s obsessive love for Albertine. And Akerman’s film is fully worthy of its source. Everything in La Captive is understated and underplayed: the lover’s jealousy, his efforts at surveillance, his relentless interrogation of the beloved, and her blankness and pliability. But this understatement is precisely right for the somber, nocturnal mood that is being depicted–love as a delirious possessiveness, doomed to impossibility, the attempt to possess a shadow, not merely another empirical person, but that person’s very otherness and mystery. It’s like trying to grasp the wind, or the darkness, in your two hands. Akerman conveys this, above all, through the rhythm, the temporality, of her film. This is a time that stops running, that turns back on itself, that keeps you waiting: not emptiness exactly, but the time of an anticipation that can never be fulfilled by presence.