This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Purely Joyful Movie!

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This is a subtly faithful interpretation of Proust's The Prisoner in which Chantal Akerman makes chasers and voyeurs out of her viewers, craning to see around street corners, straining to make out desired shapes behind warped glass. While the camera pursues the truth about Ariane, who seems to be forever drifting away, we remain fixed in the claustrophobic world of Simon's preoccupied anxiety. As did Proust, Akerman opens a space for the exploration of co-dependent attachment, not only love, and the painful reality of the search for self- avoidance. The Prisoner leaves the viewer caught between the (apparent) bliss of Ariane's ignorance and Simon's monomaniacal certainty. For me, this is the closest French cinema has come (up to now) to bottling the elusive Albertine scent. The silent film reel that plays during the film's opening too recalls the playful beaches of Balbec In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, foreshadowing undoing and tragedy. A film for anyone who understands obsession.

I have seen a lot of movies in my life and I have never walked out of the movie theater and rarely ever stopped watching a movie. If I paid to see this, I would have walked out. We had to fast forward at 2x at that was the speed the movie could have been done at. Many long scenes with no talking at all and just driving. The characters were empty with no essence, no emotion, no depth to them what so ever. The man was pathetic and his submissive girlfriend had a blank expression on her face through the whole thing. This movie could have been saved if the hint of romantic relationship with the girlfriend and her female friend would have been woven into the story. Bottom line is that what this movie lacked is what lacks in a lot of relationships where people ask later "what went wrong?": lack of communication, thats what. Moodiness, and sad puppy dog looks don't do it, we need to know what is going on through the characters' heads, what makes them tick not just what makes them obsessed. One moment of anguish sobs at his grandmas arms is not enough to wake us up from the silent, expressionless coma this movie put us in. This movie should have never been made. No one should ever see this. It would truly be a waste of your time.

Having recently discovered French actress Sylvie Testud when I saw The Chateau, I was interested in this film because she's in it. I haven't read the story that the film is supposedly based on so I had nothing to compare it to when I saw it and therefore I went in without any preconceived notions. And with a film like this, a film that doesn't operate on any conventional filmmaking level, that is a very good thing. This movie doesn't try to tell you what to think or feel about its characters; there is none of the contrivances so common in American movies, none of the manipulation. It just simply presents them and follows them and allows them to do what they do without the camera cutting away too soon for fear that the audience will get bored when there's not a lot "going on" in a scene - in fact some of the best scenes in the film have hardly any movement at all. And this is not done in a self-conscious, 'arty' let's-create-mood sort of way, which makes watching it - or rather experiencing it - even more hypnotic.This is a film that must be experienced more than once, I would say: you're not really sure what's transpired OR how you feel about what you've witnessed upon a first viewing because it doesn't hit all the 'buttons' that a commercial film is compelled to hit. And Testud is brilliant, managing to imply complexity without demonstrating it (if that makes sense) - she's beyond subtle, beyond sublime.

'La Captive' is, above all, a detective story. It opens, in scenes reminiscent of 'Vertigo', with a man following the movements of a woman later revealed to be his lover. It actually opens with him looking at her in a home video as she sits on the beach with her friend Andree. He tries to make out what she's saying, and the whole film is his attempt to read and interpret this woman, this so-called captive (the next book in Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' is called 'The Fugitive').The first word he says, though, as he watches this video, is 'je', 'I', and this is the crux of the mystery. Is he reading her with too much 'I', too much subjective misinterpretation, to the point where her personality is literally squeezed to nothing (her name is changed from Proust's Albertine to Ariane = a rien), vanishing from the film? Or is it her 'I' that Simon tries to solve, as he sets himself the impossible task of fully possessing, fully knowing another person? Who is Ariane's 'je vous aime bien' referring to - Simon or her friend sitting beside her? The title refers to a female captive, but the real prisoner here is Simon, wandering in a labyrinth of jealousy, suspicions, half-clues and lies.When a great filmmaker films a great book, it is instructive to note what she has left out as much as she leaves in. 'La Prisonniere' (why the name change?) is the fifth book in Proust's giant novel, but those thousands of pages of Proustian backstory are absent, the tortured obsession of the narrator with Albertine, his alarmed discovery of different sexualities (repressing his own?), his past (no madeleines here!), his desires, his art, his self-justifications. Indeed, where Ruiz's 'Le Temps Retrouve' is as close to Proustian FULLNESS as we are likely to get, 'La Captive' is Proust without the Proust. Set in a sort of timeless present (modern dress, period locations and mores), where Proust glides in a liberated chronology, 'La Captive' discards tastes, smells, music, comedy, society (no Charlus!), nature, time.Proust's 'La Captive' is on one level even more suffocating than this film, filled largely with the agonisings and imaginings in the head of one man who never leaves his room - are Simon's wanderings here mental peregrinations, explaining the film's air of unreality? About halfway through the book, the reader is given blessed relief with a 100-page musical soiree, which opens it from the private to the public, the analytic to the observational, the tragic to the comic. This is completely absent here, as Akerman goes for a relentless narrative of cat-and-mouse jealousy reminiscent of Chabrol's 'L'Enfer', pushed so solemnly that it eventually becomes comic. Similarly, the underlying, organising motif of the book, music, linking the narrator's awareness and transcendence of his locale, his memories of his past, his ideals for art, and Albertine, are mostly gone, making the film much more austere, and also minimising Albertine/Ariane (one exception is the beautiful sequence where Albertine and a neighbour , both birds behind cages, sing 'Cosi Fan Tutti' (women are all like that - captives?) to each other from their balconies, a breath of fresh air in their stifling lives, from another tale (like 'Vertigo' of women subjected to dangerous and repressive male jealousy).It seems strange that Akerman should choose to follow Proust's narrative trajectory, emphasising mad male obsessiveness, rather than somehow rescuing Albertine, who is as indistinct here - as an ephemeral construct in Simon's mind - as in the book. Even her final gesture of liberation is denied, with the suggestion that Simon has killed her, his 'I' literally submerging her in the beach from which, in that opening video, she emerged.Akerman's procedures are very similar to those of d'Oliveira's 'La Lettre', another transposing of an alien past to modern dress, where the cultural codes are not adapted, and hence jar, making us ask questions about the director's seemingly capricious intentions. The incongruity between the glossy imagery and the austere narrative creates a compelling mystery beyond that of plot, also reminiscent of Phillipe Garrel's 'Le vent de la nuit'. Still, I'll take Proust or Ruiz anyday. Pseuds may be interested to know that one of the machinistes was a certain Christian Metz.