{"id":78819,"date":"2026-04-24T09:48:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=78819"},"modified":"2026-04-24T09:48:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T01:48:00","slug":"la-captive-2000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=78819","title":{"rendered":"La Captive (2000)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After Jeanne Dielman<\/a><\/em> unexpectedly topped a poll of the greatest films of all time in 2022, I’d bet I’m not the only person slowly working through the body of work of Chantal Akerman. This one is a very loose adaptation of a volume from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time<\/em> and knowing nothing of the novel itself, I am stunned by the intensity and alienness of the protagonist’s mindset. It actually made me want to read the book. I’m not certain that this is better than Jeanne Dielman<\/em> but it is much less talked about and so I think severely underrated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

An elegant woman goes about her day in Paris followed not too discreetly by an equally well-dressed man. This is soon revealed to be a kind of game between the two. The man is Simon, a rich young man who lives in an apartment with his grandmother and the woman is Ariane, his girlfriend. She lives with him as well but in a separate bedroom and comes whenever he calls. The only way that he seems to be able to have sex with her is when she pretends to be asleep, letting him do whatever he wants. Afterwards he sends her back to her own room. Most of all, he is obsessively curious about every detail of her daily life which is why he follows her around everywhere. He interrogates her about all of her interactions with other people, focusing in on apparent discrepancies in her account. He becomes especially suspicious about her relationship with an opera singer L\u00e9a with whom she shares music lessons. Ariane does her best to submit to his demands without question, saying that she does this because of how much she loves him. Yet Simon despairs of never being able to truly know her mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This film feels shockingly different from both of the Akerman films we’d previously watched which were quietly pedestrian representations of daily life. La Captive<\/em> by contrast goes for high emotion with bold colors and passionate music. When Simon trails Ariane in the streets, he gives off creepy serial killer vibes. It only gets more intense when we see what passes for their domestic life as he treats her practically like a living doll. Everything is done solely for his pleasure and satisfaction while she acquiesces to every order as if she had no self of her own at all. She even takes special care to protect his feelings, claiming that she cares not at all for L\u00e9a, passively letting him seize her away from a gathering with friends, and preemptively downplaying her own love for music. Simon is never physically abusive, not does he shout orders at her. It is simply that she instantly complies with whatever he says. Perhaps even more strangely, he gets his way with other people too, such as when he interrogates two friends of Ariane about her relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The obvious question is what motivates Ariane. Why does she put up with Simon’s controlling behavior? The conventional answer would be that he is rich and provides a standard of living that she would not otherwise have access to. He is certainly very rich in such a casual way that the world seems to bend to his will. Yet that is very much not the case here as the shocking ending reveals. Akerman simply doesn’t want us to know just as it is impossible for Simon to know what is inside Ariane’s mind. It’s an astonishingly sensitive representation of the old idea that no one can ever truly know another. The effect is further enhanced by the surreality of the world that this film takes place in. It isn’t realistic at all in that no one expresses any shock at Simon’s bizarre behavior and goes along with his eccentricity. It is as if the world around him exists only to pose this dilemma, which is of course the case as this is only a film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both of the previous films by Akerman already impressed me very much. This one shows her range and how she is an artist capable of completely different styles. Adapting even a small portion of In Search of Lost Time<\/em> is already impressive and this is a masterful adaptation indeed, radically changing the context yet preserving its essence. I’m dumbfounded that this film isn’t better known and more discussed. I definitely will have to look at more of her work after this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Jeanne Dielman unexpectedly topped a poll of the greatest films of all time in 2022, I’d bet I’m not the only person slowly working through the body of work of Chantal Akerman. This one is a very loose adaptation of a volume from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and knowing nothing of … Continue reading La Captive (2000)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78819"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78954,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78819\/revisions\/78954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}