"Les Rendez-vous d'Ariane": Chantal Akerman's La Captive

"Les Rendez-vous d'Ariane": Chantai Akerman's La Captive Emma Wilson Prelude CHANTAL AKERMAN'S LA CAPTIVE (2000) opens in darkness with the sound of the sea. This darkness is interrupted by the image of mirroring waves breaking against the shore. These too are some of the closing images of the film, which comes full circle, opening and closing with a death-bearing, relentless return to the ocean. At the start, the liminal point of the film, the sound of the sea is superseded by the insistent mechanism of a Super 8 home movie projector. The film cuts from images of the sea to mnemonic traces of a lost aquatic world, a mirage or memory collage. We see a long shot of girls running into the sea. The camera then comes into their circle in the waves. The water here is milky and viscous, expressly tactile, as the waves collide with the female figures. Spray, iridescent, is caught between the camera and the forms it films, adding sensory proximity to the distanced viewing process. The camera is always moving, as the projected image itself also flickers almost imperceptibly on the screen, its images in part evanescent, retrospective, a fragile imprint of a subjective memory. The camera singles out two figures, girls who emerge from the sea arm in arm, a reflection of the boys on the beach in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971). The home movie images hold these girls close, their faces filling the frame like an almost still photograph. The camera moves to image their companions, to place them in a continuum, to mirror their already reflective proximity to each other. The camera returns once more to its ultimate elusive object, a tantalizing figure whose face now fills the screen, her eyes staring into the lens, the camera moving closer in on her impassive expression. Her haunting stillness, her pale faintly freckled skin, her large mineral eyes hold the camera captive. From this still moment, we cut to an image of a spectator winding and rewinding this memory footage. His hesitant, stammered words imitate and supplement the words missing in the absent soundtrack. He now appears watched by the two girls on his personal screen, as he continually returns their image to himself, to his presence, the rewinding of the film a mental rehearsal or paranoid return. Finally he sits in front of the image, his profile in shadow between the projector and the screen, imperfectly inserting himself into the filmed image of his desire. In the last moments of this prel60 Fall 2002 Wilson ude, the spectator watches his desired young woman eluding him, running into the sea. This viewing scenario is placed in time after the film's tragic close with the death by drowning of the haunting young woman. Her death is denied, disavowed in this hypnotic viewing process. 1. Disquieting heritage—La Captive is a loose adaptation of Marcel Proust's La Prisonnière, the volume of A la Recherche du temps perdu which traces most insistently the young narrator's desire for Albertine. Akerman has modernized Proust and changed the names of his protagonists, calling them Simon and Ariane. She locates the film in a still strange sepulchral world with paneled apartments, chauffeur-driven cars and flimsy designer clothes. Her decision to make a literary adaptation marks a new departure in Akerman's career, though the lesbian thematics of Proust's novel at least in part recall some of the explorations of female sexuality in Akerman's earlier films.1 Ginette Vincendeau, reviewing the film in Sight and Sound, writes: "La Captive (novel and film) obsessively pursues the 'mystery' of lesbian desire. You'd expect Akerman to explore the subject from a female—and lesbian—point of view; yet, perversely, she retains the male perspective, in Hitchcockian fashion ."2 One of the main things that interests me about the film is this adoption of the male perspective and what it implies about explorations of memory and fantasy introduced in contemporary feminist cinema—the cinema, say, of Catherine Breillat or Jane Campion. As we see in the opening images, like Marguerite Duras imaging the dancing and identification of LoI V. Stein...