The Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000)

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.

Darren Arnold

Image: BFI

South (Chantal Akerman, 1999)

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's documentary South, which premiered in 1999, centres on racial violence in the southern US.  The film examines the terrible aftermath of the brutal and senseless killing of James Byrd Jr., an African-American man who was murdered by a trio of white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, in 1998.  In South's early stages, Akerman's approach is near-Lynchian in its depiction of the horrors that lurk beneath the surface: the film opens with a series of tranquil and prosaic shots of Jasper, capturing quotidian life in the Deep South; however, as the narrative unspools, these images take on a different hue, reflecting the underlying racial tensions and historical weight of the region.

One of the film's most striking features is its use of long, static shots; Akerman largely allows the visuals to speak for themselves, creating a palpable sense of stillness.  The juxtaposition of the placid scenery with the horrific details of Byrd's death—he was dragged behind a truck for three miles, and his remains were recovered from 81 places—creates a queasy contrast that underlines the viciousness of the crime.  The film includes a number of interviews with local residents, police officials, and members of the wider African-American community, providing a varied perspective on the legacy of the murder.  While insightful, these sequences are eclipsed by poignant footage of Byrd's memorial service.

But South is not just about James Byrd's lynching: it is a broader statement on the embedded nature of racism, and the film's meditative tone invites the audience to consider hate crimes and their lasting impact on individuals, communities and society.  While South may be challenging for some viewers due to its deliberate pacing—despite being a mere 71 minutes long—and difficult subject matter, it is a profoundly moving and important work that grapples with a shameful episode in recent history.  Akerman's sensitive direction and the evocative imagery—the protracted final shot, as seen in the clip below, is gasp-inducing—make South a haunting and harrowing experience, one that lingers in the mind for days.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986)

Set almost entirely within the premises of a shopping centre, the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's musical Golden Eighties follows the romantic entanglements of various mall staff as they attempt to juggle their professional and private lives.  Recently restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek, Akerman's film sees the director and Delphine Seyrig reunite more than a decade on from their collaboration on the incredible, shattering Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  Whereas Seyrig commanded the screen for virtually all of Jeanne Dielman's three-plus hours, Golden Eighties features an ensemble cast in which she, playing another character named Jeanne, is joined by Myriam Boyer, Belgian pop icon Lio, Fanny Cottençon, Pascale Salkin and Charles Denner, among others.

The plot revolves around Boyer's Sylvie, a coffee shop proprietor longing for her boyfriend who is away seeking his fortune in Québec, and Eli (played by Boyer's real-life husband John Berry), an American former GI who, by chance, reconnects with clothing boutique owner Jeanne, a Jewish woman he looked after following her liberation from the death camps of WW2.  In a setup not unlike that of Alain Resnais' Muriel, in which Seyrig's Hélène receives a visit from an old flame looking to rekindle their past romance, Eli would like to restart his relationship with Jeanne, which ended with her sudden departure.  But Jeanne now has a husband (Denner) and son (Nicolas Tronc), the latter of whom has his own romantic problems as he can't choose between the flighty Lili (Cottençon) and the devoted Mado (Lio).

Golden Eighties is a most atypical film from Akerman, who is best known for her formally rigorous works, and it is easy—and reductive—to view it as her riff on the musical films of Jacques Demy (one of which, Peau d'âne, starred a customarily radiant Seyrig).  Certainly, its songs, pastel colour scheme and theme of idealised love (which eventually yields to more pragmatic needs) are a good fit for a Demy musical, yet there's a Resnaisian wistfulness present here, and Jeanne's past trauma means that the holocaust, not for the first or last time in Akerman's work, comes under consideration (the director's mother survived Auschwitz).  It says much about Akerman's skill that this weighty element can be added in such a way that the resulting film contains not so much as a hint of tonal uncertainty.

It is not inapt to suggest that Golden Eighties is a fine entry point for those unfamiliar with Akerman's oeuvre, and it is certainly the most accessible of her films; as such, it has sometimes been dismissed as one of the director's lesser efforts.  But anyone rejecting any project involving Akerman and Seyrig should do so at their peril, and indeed this film has much more depth than its frothy, cheerful veneer might suggest.  Perhaps the most striking aspect of Golden Eighties is that it was set and made in the middle of the decade of its weirdly prescient title—the film, especially in this restored version, has the look and feel of a fairly recent 80s parody—so the styles and fashions of the era are presented more or less as they were.  Akerman, it seems, was acutely tuned in to the moment she was living in.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI