In the clip above, I discuss “The Captive,” Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Proust’s “La Prisonnière.” I first saw the film at a screening in Paris in 2000, soon after its première at the Cannes festival, and was struck from the second scene—in effect, a car chase, in which a young man (Stanislas Merhar) follows a young woman to what he suspects is a romantic assignation—by Akerman’s ingenious assimilation of a rich array of cinematic influences, and, in particular, by her transformation of a work of literature into a cinematic work that refracts, with a distinctive modernism, a particular genre, namely, melodrama. Akerman pares the novel to a stark, dramatic situation, jettisons Proust’s serpentine prose in favor of glossy, romanticizing images, pares the dialogue down to the essential, and overall pays tribute not to the literary source she adapts but to the cinematic genre she employs.
The subject of the story is a rich young man who is in love with a young woman who lives with him and his grandmother in his family’s sumptuous Parisian apartment, and who, he begins to suspect, is a lesbian. In particular, he believes that she is having an affair with an opera singer (played by the lively, graceful Aurore Clément), and his attempts to satisfy his curiosity are scenes of pure cinematic suspense.
The second scene of the film is reminiscent of work by Alfred Hitchcock; but the first, in which the young man, Simon (Stanislas Merhar), watches home movies of the woman, Ariane (Sylvie Testud), inscribes the movie in the modernism of reflexive art, of movies containing movies. Scene after scene suggests the doomed romanticism of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” the sexual conflict of his “Masculine Feminine,” and the critical alignment of wealth and beauty of his “Nouvelle Vague” (still, astonishingly, unreleased here; Gilberto Perez wrote brilliantly about it in The Nation and in his book “The Material Ghost”). With these allusions, Akerman is both artist and critic—she both plants Proust firmly in the most advanced cinematic tradition and reveals Godard to be a prime melodramatist.
As for the most exemplary cinematic melodramatist, Douglas Sirk, he understood the irrationality and the absurd coincidences on which melodrama runs, and to which melodrama lends the allure of inevitability—in a great melodrama, contingency itself is what’s tragic. In “The Captive,” the iridescent play of identity in the light of fixed circumstances comes off as the most tragic contingency of all.
