La Captive and the power of love

Abstract

Many films dealing with sexuality do so through pushing ever further into a physical realism, but others—like La Captive/The Captive (Akerman, 2000) and Dut yeung nin wa/In the Mood for Love (Kar-Wei, 2000)—look to emphasize the subtler levels of the psychological. Through a series of retreats from conventional notions of realism, Chantal Akerman's La Captive abstracts thought from action and arrives at a work that tells us much about the oblique necessity of the obsessional. Working through the (direct) influence of Proust and, less intentionally, Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), the director finds a way of continually asking questions of the central character Simon, his lover Ariane, and by extension the audience as we're made aware that the object of affection is rather less significant than the subjective feelings we choose to attach to it. Akerman subsequently offers perhaps the most ambitious example yet of what we might call the ‘chaste enquiry’.