The Cinematheque

“[A] rarely screened 2000s masterpiece … Sylvie Testud makes Ariane completely enigmatic, through a brilliantly controlled impassive performance.”

David Schwartz, Screen Slate

Akerman entered the new century with a project she’d been circling since the 1970s: a film adaptation of Marcel Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu. (“It was the first time I’d read such a treatment of female homosexuality in a book,” she recalled.) Made manageable by focusing on the fifth volume La prisonnière—and further distilling it to only the most elemental plot—La captive stages a tortured tale of jealousy and obsession largely within the chambers of a baroque Parisian apartment. There, shut-in Simon (Stanislas Merhar) harbours suspicions that his girlfriend Ariane (Sylvie Testud), passively obedient to his demands and erotic fixations, is having an affair with a woman. Proust’s text places the reader in the tormented psyche of the male protagonist; Akerman and co-writer Eric de Kuyper take a more detached, Bressonian approach, scrutinizing the meaning of love and the conditions—social, economical, something more enigmatic—that may explain Ariane’s voluntary captivity.

In French with English subtitles

“Majestic tableaux of sumptuous settings and colours that resonate with the roiling mysteries and voluptuous overtones of films by Alfred Hitchcock.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“One of the finest literary adaptations ever made … A spare, inventive rumination on the author’s key themes: jealousy and possession … Beyond Akerman’s inspired interventions in this page-to-screen transfer, La captive​’s greatest achievement is its exploration of love between women.”

Melissa Anderson, Artforum