Chantal Akerman and Nick James. Magnificent Obsession.

Chantal Akerman and Nick James. Magnificent Obsession. Sight and Sound. Vol. 11, No. 5, 2000. (English).

La Captive is a film like no other curently on London's screens, but if the director's name, Chantal Akerman, puts you in mind of an avant-garde, confrontationally feminist cinema from the past, you'd be wrong this time. Similarly, if the fact that La Captive is another Proust adaptation made in the wake of Raúl Ruiz's magisterial Time Regained with the same producer, Paolo Branco, prompts you to expect more Visconti like opulence and moving scenery, such preconceptions should be banished. La Captive does explore territory that once nourished many auteurs - the very borders between sexual obsession, dream logic and madness where Hitchcock and Buñuel plied their trade - but it now seems Akerman's alone.

All the autobiography and deconstruction we've come to expect of Akerman since her 1975 breakthrough feature Jeanne DieImann 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles are here subsumed to the cause of creating a truly cinematic world of allure, distraction and unknowing. And it may match a new mood in the director herself. As the interview below was finishing, she toid me, "I forget how difficult I used to he. I see some people in the industry and I say hello and they ignore me because they still remember I was obnoxious 20 years ago."

La Captive adapts the section of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu titled La Prisonniere, in which Proust's well-born narrator Marcel describes his tortuous relationship with his live in mistress Albertine. To himself Marcel professes his indifference to his mistress, but outwardly he behaves with extreme jealous possessiveness. The obsessive lover in Akerman's film is Simon (Stanislas Merhar), a very rich young man of the present day. He not only uses a mutual female friend Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) to spy on and chaperone his girlfriend Ariane (Sylvie Testud), he himself follows Ariane like a stalker. His jealousy of Ariane's female friends (some of whom are almost certainly her lovers) is more pronounced than in Proust. Simon wants to know not just "what goes on" between women, but what they're thinking, and the unattainability of his girlfriend's mind is compounded only by the unattainability of the lesbian worldview.

La Captive opens with amateur film footage of the Normandy beach frolics of Ariane, Andrée and several other women on holiday together, who all display a communal air of closed-off intimacy, a collective Gioconda smile. At one moment Ariane, a wiry, freckled presence, looks directly at the camera as if challenging the audience to discover who she is. Then we find out that the silent amateur film is being projected by Simon, and that he's trying to lipread what Ariane is saying as she stands next to Andrée. "I like you very much," is his conclusion. Cut to Ariane in a summer dress and high heels striding confidently through a near-deserted Place Vendôme in Paris. She's being watched as she gets into her open-top Mercedes by Simon, in the driving seat of his Rolls. As we see her move off from Simon's viewpoint and the Rolls follows behind, the shooting style reminds us irresistibly of police detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) tailing Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak - whose character is undoubtedly named with Proust in mind) through the streets of San Francisco in Vertigo, especially as the orchestral music - swells: a doom laden, watery piece by Rachmaninov, The Isle of the Dead, that's highly reminiscent of Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann. Soon Simon is following Ariane at a distance as she climbs one of the steep stairways of Montmartre. The click-clack of her determined progress is in stark contrast with Simon's entranced silence. He seems to glide with his arms fixed at his sides, like a Magritte figure floating through a De Chirico Paris. But when he reaches the hotel he's seen Ariane enter and the receptionist tells him she's booked a room for her aunt, not for herself, we're thrown into another surrealist's arms - those of Buñuel and his discreetly charming but bewildered bourgeoisie.

It would be all too easy to over-emphasise the myriad influences here, which amount to nothing more than a drinking in of cimema on Akerman's part. What's completely unique is La Captive's extraordinary sense of time. As Ariane explores an art museum under Simon's gaze, the tension is excruciating. Ariane's heels clomp on the wooden floorboards as she strides through the exhibits, seemingly in real time, while Simon's slower steps only make the floor groan and creak. The elastic time frame of this ridiculous bout of hide-and-seek is typically dreamlike. It's clear Ariane must know what Simon gets up to and it may be part of the game they play in which sex can occur only after he's pretended to do something else and she's fallen asleep. You could widen that out and suggest that his suspicions of her lesbianism are equaily part of their rituals and that without them the obsession would disappear.

You can read it either way, especially as Akerman makes sure her film always puts us in Simon's position. Though he's a shit who behaves as if he owns Ariane- in one scene he even drags her away from an opera-house reception without the slightest nod towards social niceties- the women, do all seem as if they're lying to him. Andrée - his supposed confidante and Ariane's chaperone - is also number one suspect as Ariane's lover (while Simon dry humps her sIeeping form, Ariane calls out Andrée's name). These dualities all contribute to the feeling of a work of pure cinema, one that doesn't give up its meanings in the first reei, or even at the first screening. In portraying the enigma of woman from a man's point of view, Akerman successfully reveals the real enigma of the unknowability of any human being to another. And of course Simon, with his obsession and his pollen allergies (which seem analogous to post-coital disgust), is as much of a captive of his own imagination as Ariane.

Nick James: How do you see the relationship between 'La Captive' and Proust's 'La Prisonnière'?

Chantal Akerman: It's a free adaptation, what I call "inspired by". When you make an adaptation the way we did, you start by asking, "What do I remember of the book?" Then what you get comes out of your own consciousness, so it's already different from the originial.

You make Simon very unsympathetic - and given that Marcel in the novel is to some extent Proust himself, that might seem hostile.

Marcel in La Prisonnière is not sympathetic, but we've known him since he was a child, so we understand. I didn't aim to make Simon unsympathetic, but neither did I try to make him Proust, which is why I changed his name. I'm trying to represent the situation. In another section Marcel says something like, "I kiss my grandmother but I'm only kissing some flesh. In a way I won't ever be able to kiss her because two people can never totally merge." That's what the film's about and it's what's at stake in the book. Women are mysterious to other women too- in the end you never know anyone. But the problem is more obvious between a man and a woman.

Why did you set It in the present, in a wealthy milieu? It's in modern-day dress but it's a timeless world. It's not a naturalistic movie, it's psychological - real but not realist. I liked the fact that they're rich because it allowed me to concentrate on the relationship, to go to the core of the subject. If Simon had been working then he would have lost his iob through being obsessed and I would have had to have shown that. Or I could have had two people on welfare with all the time in the world but then it would have become sociological and I didn't want that.

Is that why it feels like a dream?

For me Simon is a vampire bleeding Ariane of her life. You could say it's a bit like some of Buñuel's films, but the eroticism, the desire, the subject are all treated differently. A lot of Buñuel's films are about transgression, but that's not the case here - I'm not coming from a Catholic background, I'm not even fighting against one.

The dream quality comes across in several ways - in the elastic sense of time, the way Simon moves as if he's in a trance, the way he prefers Ariane when she's asleep.

That's their way of having sex. And it's very close to Proust's description. They both take pleasure, but it's a separate pleasure, fantasmique. I think everyone needs fantasy to make their sexuality work.

The opening sequence is reminiscent of 'Vertigo'.

I love Vertigo and I watched the sequence where Jimmy Stewart is following Kim Novak to see how it was done. But La Captive is about someone who tries to unpick another person's mind, whereas in Vertigo Stewart does the reverse, building up am image of Novak to match his fantasy When, you try to show reality in cinema, most of the time it's totally false, but when you show what's going on in people's minds that's very cinematic.

Several of your films have been autobiographical. Were you consciously exploring things about your own nature through this male character?

Of course you can see obsession in my movies. It's the way I work. When my co-scriptwriter Eric de Kuyper saw the film for the first time he said I'd made it against the script, and certainly the script wasn't as tense as the movie. Even I was surprised when I did the rough cut by how tense it was.

How do you go about rehearsing your actors for their deadpan performances?

With this script I didn't have to say much. We rehearsed for three or four weeks, three or four times a week. They came for a couple of hours to my place and it was very very quiet. Simon was problematic for Stanislas because he sees himself as a tough guy, but after a while it became natural. Playing the tough guy is a pose for him anyway - -he's more true to himself in this movie than in life.

Sylvie plays It right down.

Sylvie is probably one of the greatest actors of her generation. She's very clever and you might expect her way of playing to be very intellectual, but in fact she's both instinctive and controlled.

Your films are known for moments that break the frame, that make audiences aware of their role as spectators.

When Sylvie gazes directly at the camera it gives the film a one-to-one relationship with the audience. They cannot lose themselves, they're forced to think. When you're eaten up by a movie so you cease to exist it's a very narcotic feeling. I don't allow the public just to enjoy being voyeurs. This may be why more people don't go to my movies.

Didn't 'La Captive' do as well in France as you'd hoped?

'The producer's happy but I'd have liked a bigger success. People seem to love the movie when they see it but for some reason they're reluctant to make the step. Perhaps they know instinctively they're not going to be able to lose themselves in the warmth of the cinematic womb. Of course if we had eight theaters instead of five and a little more publicity we'd have done better. But not like Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, for instance, which isn't so far from my film in its subject. I would have been happy to have achieved 10 percent of that.

'La Captive' opens on 27 Aprl and is reviewed on page 45.