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Tap-tap-tap... Preceded by the clicking of her high heels, a young woman (Sylvie Testud) walks through the Place Vendôme in Paris, the camera following her in one unbroken shot until she reaches her car. A young man (Stanislas Mehrar) follows her, gets into his own car, and continues tailing her.
In Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du temps perdu the young woman was Albertine and the man was Marcel. For La Captive (1999), her latest narrative feature to-date, Chantal Akerman, adapting À la Recherche's fifth volume, calls her Ariane. While much has been written about Proust's driver/companion Albert, who might be hidden behind the oddly feminine name of Albertine, Ariane is a name without masculine equivalent: in Greek mythology she was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae who fell in love with Theseus and gave him a magic ball of twine to find his way in the labyrinth.1 In ARiANE, one finds five letters of AkERmAN. From Proust to Albert to Albertine to, finally, Ariane and Akerman, there is a vertiginous interplay of sliding equivalences, of masks that simultaneously frame, hide and reveal some secret. In the film Ariane's partner, lover, captor and tormentor is named Simon, preserving the narrator's Jewishness, as well as alluding to Albertine's family name: Simonet.
In La Captive, updated to contemporary times, Simon lives a comfortable existence of homme de lettres in a large bourgeois apartment that he shares with his grandmother and a housekeeper, Françoise,2 and in which he keeps a young woman of unclear social status. Plagued by allergies and asthma, Simon is unable to accompany Ariane when she goes out, however, suspecting her
