La captive

In August of last year I published a piece on this blog entitled "L-U-V," in which I digressed at length on concepts of love and desire as latent to a number of eminent cinematic works. In this winding series of textual analyses and high-minded expostulations I at one point made passing mention of Chantal Akerman's La captive (2000), her adaptation of Proust's La prisonnière (volume six of his À la recherche du temps perdu.) I called Proust's book "the finest work of fiction we have on the subject of a woman held in a man's captivity" (which may be overstating it) and Akerman's loose adaptation as one of the greatest films of all time (which is not overstating it), suggesting that the agenda of the piece I was then in the process of writing did not provide me with an opportunity to go on about La captive therein the way it ought to be gone on about. Akerman's film truly is one of my very favourites. It is also very much a fundamental text on the subject of desire (and ultimately, perhaps, on love). It tells the story of Simon (rendered by the stoic and moribund Stanislas Merhar) and his obsessive, self-destructive relationship with his cagey and enigmatic live-in girlfriend Ariane (as rendered by the mousy and fleet Sylvie Testud). They live together with Simon's grandmother, the seldom-seen matriarch who nominally rules over the well-appointed apartment, speaking as the place does to a kind of old-world old-money luxury. (The apartment is constantly being traversed by bustling laborers, demarcating it as some kind of provisional space.) Simon himself seemingly has no ancillary professional-type responsibilities to keep him from following Ariane on her daily journeyings and fussing about her more generally. He also routinely interrogates her friends, as though almost willing into existence some troubling revelation. The extremely curious erotic life of Simon and Ariane (who normally sleep in separate rooms) is primarily represented in two scenes where Simon performs a kind of miserable frottage on her person whilst she provisionally feigns sleep. The notion that the title of the film refers to Ariane, which we would almost certainly at first assume it does, is continually problematized by the fact she is clearly in some way getting something out of this relationship. There is a kind of unspoken psychosexual agreement here, as there would be between consenting individuals in a properly demarcated sadomasochistic relationship, with its roles and intensive relations rigorously established. What is clear is that Ariane is free to go at any time. Indeed, towards the end she is explicitly invited (or rather ordered) to do so. At her reluctance. (The injunction is rescinded.) Simon's obsessive possessiveness and neurotic paranoia hardly seem to faze her. Just as she feigns sleep in capitulation to some fantasmatic arrangement when Simon rubs up against her, she likewise feigns doe-like innocence and perplexity in the face of Simon's endless interrogations and badgerings. It becomes evident that Simon is perhaps a captive to his own debasing desire far more than Ariane ever has been or will be. He exerts no physical authority over her. He does not treat her violently, nor physically attempt to circumscribe her movements (for the most part), fuss and worry over them though he does. Simon is trapped in Heidegger's eddy. He cannot come to any acceptance regarding the lack of fixity and deep impenetrability of the object of desire, the beloved Other. Simon is a feminized figure. Where he would exert phallic authority or domain, he continually comes up against his own powerlessness and symbolic castration. It is telling that what primarily fuels his consuming paranoia is the fear not that Ariane will leave him for another man but rather that her secret desire is not only to hook up with another woman but to literally be subsumed in a net of Sapphic desire that Simon sees rivening the world he traverses from beneath its surface (or from behind it). Not only is Simon himself divested of phallic agency, he operates in fear that the world in which his desire circulates is one in which the phallus has been commandingly disavowed in toto. Simon ultimately fears that his gender, which ultimately hardly suits him, is a profound redundancy. Akerman has said that when she began to adapt the Proust she had a fairly workable sense of what the text was saying. When she had finished the screenplay, however, she found she no longer had a handle on what the film she was making in fact was. She says she expected that shooting and cutting the film would resolve all this, but once postproduction was complete she still found the film profoundly opaque. I would agree that part of what makes the film so utterly extraordinary an experience is that, considered alongside its superlative formal rigour and aesthetic glory, it holds the spectator at something of a remove. There are things behind things here that never reveal themselves, just as the desired Other within the film herself becomes walled-off and no less compulsively compelling for all that. I have always identified deeply with Akerman as an artist because of how she grapples with the modern problem par excellence: alienation. Ariane paraphrases to Simon in the back of his luxury car, as they are chauffeured about, something she has read recently in a book: "choice, desire, fear, and death," she says, "leave men and women face to face alone." Simon and Ariane represent two modes of operating in relation to standing face to face alone with the Other. Simon represents the preeminent figure of literary modernism: he suffers, obsesses, and drives himself to distraction with denaturing existential dread. Ariane, on the other hand, seems lithe and at ease, playful, untroubled. Akerman's work has often, to my mind, served to draw us a map from dire existential alienation to untroubled play. As such she has always struck me as one of the most down-to-brass-tacks useful artists at least some of whose life coincided with mine. There is almost no denying, however, that as exemplary a model as Akerman presents us in the guise of Ariane, the director's primary identification here is with Simon. When I say that this film directed by a woman, photographed by another woman, and edited by yet another woman primarily identifies itself with the perspective of a man who seeks to mercilessly control and possess a woman, it is important to remember that we are talking about a man who is central to a mobilized libidinal economy which in all its constituent parts ultimately serves to disavow the phallus. Akerman is obviously herself aware of much of the academic discourse on film to have emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with its grounding in psychoanalytic discourse. Scholars like Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz have gone to considerable length to gender the apparatus of traditional cinema itself as male. Akerman plays off this at the beginning of the film. La captive begins with footage shot on Super 8 of Ariane and a group of young women frolicking on a beach at what we will later come to find out is Normandy. The young women self-consciously orient the (what will prove to be erotically weighted) spectacle of their filiation explicitly for the camera. We cut to Simon manning a film projector, slowing the film, rewinding it, fussing over it. The first word he says is "Je ..." before he trails off, then repeats the word. Akerman is very consciously framing the film we are about to watch around this conjunction between the cinematic apparatus, the male protagonist, and the enunciation of the first person pronoun. Akerman as enunciating author-function as expressed by the text becomes very explicitly conjoined in scopic filiation with Simon. (The film's fixation with the scopic and the obsessional, it bears noting, is reflected in the debt it pays to Hitchcock, especially its explicit oft-discussed invocation of Vertigo (1958) in the virtuoso stalking sequences.) There are not many instances in cinema where a director has this explicitly married his or her point of identification with a protagonist. Simon walks up to the screen and reaches out to Ariane's image, a gulf between them, an integument. Ariane enters the picture as a productive figure of schism and disruption. One of the primary ways she does this is through her voice. The voice of Ariane is, in fact, one of the great voices in all of cinema. Wanting to write about Ariane's voice, I took it upon myself to read my copy, sitting around unread for ever-so-long, of The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema by Kaja Silverman. According to Silverman, there are three ways the female voice in dominant cinema is made to bear the mark of her own castration as well as the castration of the male, which is forcibly displaced onto her. Silverman is a Lacanian, so what we are talking about is castration beyond the Freudian penile concern; this is the castration experienced by the putative subject as it transfers from the mirror phase into the realm of the symbolic by virtue of introduction into language and discourse, thus being divested of its previous integrated wholeness (symbolic castration). Silverman sees the female voice made to bear the brunt of castration by virtue of: 1) the voice being further recessed into the diegesis (the contained world represented in the film), by virtue, for example, of having the voice originate from a woman confined by a frame within the frame, placed on a stage, or presented on a screen inside the screen; 2) explicit grounding of the female voice in the female body, never allowing it to become expressive of the cinematic apparatus and thus the phallic domain; 3) the situation of this voice in a context where it becomes held up to heightened scrutiny (such as the context wherein a woman speaks with an analyst or therapist). In other instances the female voice becomes an analogue for the enveloping maternal voice through which the child first identifies itself in the pre-symbolic domain. I would insist that Ariane's voice (which is essentially, of course, the voice of actress Sylvie Testud) performs a radical function anterior to anything Silverman covers. And when we speak of Ariane's voice we must speak of her singing. Ariane is, of course, as already hinted at, emblematic of visual recessing within the diegesis from the first images of the film on. We first see her on a screen within a screen. A screen, no less, lorded over by Simon. Again and again Ariane is visually recessed, contained. What her voice is doing, however, from the moment we first hear it, is superseding that visual containment and indeed implicitly representing her as uncontainable. The first couple times we hear her sing she does so nominally from within the diegesis but as a voice-off, that is from off-screen. Sound is always less constrained than the visual. When I think of sound I always think of that most exemplary of sound films, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956). In Bresson's film, the protagonist Fontaine builds his escape from prison first with his ears. His ears are free to wander the corridors whilst his eyes remain locked in his cell. Ariane's voice not only breaks free from the confines of recessed or prison-like space, reaching out into spaces where she cannot be seen, but it likewise escapes from her. (It is worth noting that the walls of the apartment seem extremely porous, sound constantly bleeding.) It goes without saying that in the particular alienated world we have already seen established that nothing is more invisible or problematic (for Simon and by extension this particular iteration of the cinematic apparatus) as the Other's interiority. Ariane, recessed though she may be within the diegesis, does not bear the brunt of Simon's symbolic castration, rather she violently confronts him with it. She sings to Simon his lack. Music from within the diegesis of La captive generally has a tendency to explode out of the movie, one of many forces constantly destabilizing Simon's world and disrupting the apparatus of containment that would have Ariane remain docile and pliable (or asleep, as she pretends to be in the only two sex acts depicted in the film). It is indeed during her purported singing lessons that Simon is most worried that Ariane is involved in lesbian dalliances. Singing becomes conceptualized as a libidinal domain of feminine crypto-exchange. The central set-piece of the movie speaks to this. It is one of my favourite set-pieces in all cinema, ever-so-brief though it is. One night as Simon leaves the apartment building, he hears Ariane, framed recessively in a window above him, begin to sing an aria from Così fan tutti. She is soon joined in a duet by a woman in an adjacent building, singing herself from behind barred windows. This piece of music with its decisive lesbian connotations, sung by two women visually pinned, figuratively imprisoned, within visual space, disrupting as it does a whole regime of containment, far from forcing the two vocalists to bear the mark of castration, produces an anarchic fissure, localizing lack and powerlessness decisively in the conceptual space formerly occupied by the phallus and the Law of the Father (to wax psychoanalytic). It is in this context that a would-be captor becomes captive. Desire, a wound, torment. A whirlpool. It would seem that Simon's efforts to finally release Ariane, in effect an attempt to love her, are primarily conducted in order to release himself from his captivity. Unfortunately, though in a way that I find edifying and cathartic, without giving too much away, it all ends in the whirlpool. Akerman has found a perfect actor in Stanislas Merhar. Instead of coming off crazed, he simply seems very, very sad.