La Captive

Official Selection: Cannes Film Festival

From acclaimed director Chantal Akerman and inspired by Proust's La Prisonniere, La Captive is an elegant meditation on desire, obsession, love and possession.

Handsome, elegantly dressed and hopelessly neurotic, Simon Levy (Stanislas Merhar) lives in a labyrinthine, half-renovated Paris flat with his ailing grandmother (Francoise Bertin), faithful family servant (Liliane Rovere) and Ariane Rey (Silvie Testud), the object of his unquenchable desire.

Simon is obsessed with Ariane and keeps her as his willing captive. She tolerates his elaborate desires, his endless interrogations and surveillance. Still Ariane is able to maintain her own reserve of privacy, her own mental and physical freedom. Although often affectionate to Simon, Ariane prefers women and so leads a double-life. But this only magnifies Simon's pain until his obsessive desires culminate in devastation and tragedy.