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First released in 2000, Chantal Akerman's The Captive is an updating of Marcel Proust's The Prisoner, the fifth volume of his epic novel In Search of Lost Time. This striking, formally rigorous film reframes Proust's study of obsessive control to great effect; perhaps surprisingly, Akerman made just one other literary adaptation, her eponymous 2010 film of Joseph Conrad's debut novel Almayer's Folly. The Captive is one of four of the late Belgian director's features—the others being Golden Eighties, Tomorrow We Move and De Afspraken van Anna—that have recently been restored in 4K by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.
The Captive follows Simon (Stanislas Merhar), a rich idler who becomes increasingly obsessed with his girlfriend Ariane (Sylvie Testud). Simon dictates and monitors every aspect of Ariane's life, and is particularly interested in her friend Andrée (Olivia Bonamy), with whom he suspects she is having an affair; Ariane, for her part, is compliant yet inscrutable. The long takes and attenuated pacing allow the audience to fully immerse themselves in the characters' fractured psychology, while the immaculate cinematography, by the Léopoldville-born Sabine Lancelin, lends an icy claustrophobia to the proceedings.
Merhar, who later played the title role in the beguiling Almayer's Folly, delivers a fine performance as Simon, deftly capturing the character's vanity and neuroses as he attempts to tighten his grip on Ariane. Testud, who would also go on to reteam with Akerman (on Tomorrow We Move), is equally impressive, with her Ariane embodying an opaqueness that keeps her a mystery to Simon and the audience alike. As the film presents the fraught dynamic between the ethereal Ariane and the controlling Simon, Akerman explores wildly contrasting ideas of love and the blurred lines that sit between devotion and possession.
It may well be that Ariane is as unknowable to Simon as Proust is to the non-francophone; it's been posited that English translations of In Search of Lost Time—of which there have been several—largely fail to illuminate the text. There is also the challenge of another kind of translation: that of adapting Proust, who was openly dismissive of cinema, for the screen. Prior to The Captive, filmmakers Volker Schlöndorff (Swann in Love) and Raúl Ruiz (Time Regained) grappled gamely with other volumes from the same novel, but it is perhaps Chantal Akerman's haunting effort that best captures the essence of Proust's magnum opus.
