La Belle Captive

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Along with his status as an important postwar writer of the New Novel school, Alain Robbe-Grillet's place in film history is secure thanks to his debut screenwriting effort, Last Year at Marienbad, the all-time puzzle picture. His own directing efforts have been less accessible outside France, but the 1983 La Belle Captive represents the Robbe-Grillet idea. R-G based the movie on his own novel, which was itself inspired by the paintings of Magritte. The set-up is one of those nightmare-chasing-its-own-tail scenarios: a man (Daniel Mesguich) becomes entranced by a young woman (Gabrielle Lazure) dancing in a nightclub, but later that night he finds her crumpled body on the road. The woman becomes his obsession; meanwhile, his boss (who happens to be a hot babe on a motorcycle) gives him a mysterious assignment. Any initial intrigue on either the erotic or whodunit front quickly dissipates in a maddening series of teases, and even if you like reality/fantasy/dream interplay, your patience may grow thin after a while. The movie's cheapjack '80s look doesn't help, but more than anything La Belle Captive reminds us of the difference between a writer, however talented, and a real director, like Alain Resnais. Resnais' direction of Last Year at Marienbad is an elegant glide into ever-deepening mysteries of place, personality, and memory, but Robbe-Grillet's direction of La Belle Captive never finds wings for its ideas. --Robert Horton

Description

Alain Robbe-Grillet's erotically-charged film portrays a married man's obsession with a mysterious woman who steps out of his fantasies. Walter (Daniel Mesguich) becomes fascinated with Marie-Ange (Gabrielle Lazure) after seeing her in a nightclub. One evening he finds her bound in the middle of the road. After a surreal night of passion, he awakens the next morning wondering if it all was just a dream.

A sensuous, surreal drama in the manner of EYES WIDE SHUT and MULHOLLAND DRIVE

Customer Reviews:

a rare find.......2007-07-28

I keep searching for Robbe-Grillet, and become frustrated. Nice to see that one has been released

mildly amused.......2007-04-02

cinematography of poetic images is fairly good. The plot, however, is based on unreality and confusion about realtiy and may not interest the more concretely based. Definitly not a thriller, but nice to watch.

If Lynch and Eisenstein teamed up to do 'Chinatown' as a vampire story.......2007-03-28

You'd get something like `La Belle Captive'. Because this movie, written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is wildly at odds with what most people expect in a film, I am breaking my review into three parts. First, I'll take a stab at listing some films or genres which bear some affinities (however distant) to the sort of animal we're considering here, which hopefully might indicate that a purchaser will enjoy the flick. Then I'll discuss the movie itself with perhaps a bit of technical appreciation, and then finally take a look at the director's theory of storytelling.

If you've seen the famous Resnais/Robbe-Grillet collaboration Last Year at Marienbad, this is more and better (I enjoyed the cinematography more in "La Belle Captive" and found the world, the characters and their story potentials much richer). Now the promised list: noir is a good place to start, films like "Chinatown" or "Somewhere in the Night" with their evolving polymorphic characters, stylized scenes and constantly thwarted plot expectations have a lot in common with "La Belle Captive". Also, the nonlinear fragmented collage of `La Belle Captive' may be attractive to fans of `Eraserhead' or `Memento' or `Dark City' or `Pulp Fiction' or `Satyricon'. Speaking of the editing, Robbe-Grillet plays games with time and space similar to what Maya Deren does in `Meshes of the Afternoon'.

We first meet the protagonist Walter in a nightclub, where he confesses that he doesn't really know or remember what he's doing there, watching stroboscopically lit couples dancing robotically. With moves that would do Lulu proud, a slinky blonde flirts with him. Though he poses at the bar like Bond or Mike Hammer, and Walter and the girl bump and grind on the dance-floor, he can't get the girls name, phone number or address, though she promises that she'll find him, if she needs to. In the voiceover we learn he's a secret agent. His boss/handler calls for Walter at the bar to arrange for a rendezvous that night, and after the call, the girl has disappeared. The meeting is in a backlit, foggy graveyard. The boss, Sara Zeitgeist is a sultry Emma Peale type (her leather bodysuit is open to reveal a fluffly and frilly blouse front) and she is revealed to be the woman driving the black motorcycle who's mysteriously been popping up between scenes throughout the credits and beginning of the movie. Curiously, the normal filmic interpretation suggests that she was on her black and chrome bike when she made the call, since we see her hurling down the road before and after the call. Sara gives her subordinate a letter that must be delivered to Count Henri de Corinthe, preferably that night. When he heads off on his mission, Walter sees the mystery girl lying injured in the road, with her hands cuffed behind her back. Mission forgotten, he takes the girl to a nearby mansion where they interrupt a formal party of strange and ominous men, but finally manages to get a doctor to escort them to a bedroom. The doctor locks them in the room and leaves them there. After a night of vampiric bloodthirsty passion (Walter seems to be sick or only semiconscious) he awakens alone in a ruined mansion. Then the movie starts to get really weird, he drives around and doesn't recognize the streets or buildings, ends up investigating the disappearance (and possible death perhaps the night before, perhaps 7 years before) of his lover, the bite wound on his neck comes and goes, he starts meeting the same actors playing different roles seemingly without recognizing them, manages to become the prime suspect in the kidnapping of the fiancee of the man he was supposed to meet, encounters a mad scientist, and beomes increasingly involved in visions or dreams of his lover on a beach in Uruguay. Walter is buffeted through all these scenarios by necessities he hardly questions and is driven by his passion for his lover and the orders of his boss. I said that I'd mention a couple technical points--this movie is constructed like some of the old silent films, which in a lot ways echo the current theory and practice of comic books, in which the images are central and the dialogue subordinate (though very important for moving the story along). The camera work is very static, and unlike some cinematographers who use fixed framing for a feeling of candidness, Robbe-Grillet makes us conscious that the image is imposed on us and artificial. The sets and scenes and costuming are all very stylized, almost fetishistic (Walter is a detective when he's in his trenchcoat).

If you've never seen any of Robbe-Grillet's work before, you'll be hard pressed to figure out what's going on. On the other hand, if you've gone beyond a casual acquaintance with Robbe-Grillet, then you've likely developed a masochistic craving for the stylish presentation of insoluble puzzles. Robbe-Grillet builds his plots around the natural human tendency to fit pieces together into familiar patterns, he's playing with his audience's expectations. As with the standard and very formulaic cinematic fare, the viewer strives to forge links that will tie all the elements into tidy coherent whole, one which will resolve all the apparent anomalies. It's odd, in the real world we don't have any certainty that we can construct such a narratve, but we are confident we can do so in art. However, rather than a complete story emerging from the mass of disparities, multiple counterfeit stories are struck simultaneously and are both affirmed and invalidated at every turn. Accepting a particular narrative involves surpressing the alternatives, like those pictures which either look like a vase or two faces and as new scenes unfold, one view may be favored or a new one start to coalesce. The whole approach is very much like the old noir movies, except no final revelation ties everything together (though in a few of the old classics, such as Suspicion or Rebecca, the audience may find themselves dissatisfied with an `explanation' that the characters in the movie accept).

Average customer rating:

Brutally direct look at obsession.
Better than Ambien

The Captive/La Captive
Starring: Stanislas Merhar , Sylvie Testud , Olivia Bonamy , Liliane Rovère , and Françoise Bertin
Director: Chantal Akerman
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0000YEDZ4
Release Date: 2004-01-27

Description

Handsome and hopelessly neurotic Simon (Stanislas Merhar) lives in a labyrinthine Parisian apartment with his ailing grandmother (Last Year at Marienbad"s Francoise Bertin) and Ariane (Sylvie Testud), the object of his unquenchable desire. Obsessed, Simon keeps Ariane as his willing captive; she tolerates his endless interrogations and surveillance but is able to maintain her own reserve of privacy and freedom. However, she leads a passionate double life with other women that magnifies Simon"s pain and culminates in a devastating finale. Directed by international film sensation Chantal Akerman (A Couch in New York, Night and Day), inspired by Marcel Proust"s La Prisonniere.

Customer Reviews:

Brutally direct look at obsession........2006-11-10

Simon is a writer with an endless supply of nice suits and gorgeous furnishings, living in a beautiful apartment with his girlfriend Ariane, and his ailing mother. The Paris apartment is large, lovely, and currently under renovation; as Simon never seems to do any work, one wonders how he can afford such things. Ariane is the soft-spoken embodiment of the caged bird, a lesbian who allows herself to be kept with Simon, enduring his uncomfortable and odd sexual encounters. Simon, fearing Ariane is not fully his, wants desperately to possess Ariane so much so that his days and nights are filled with interrogations, accusations, and spying. Unsatisfied, he delves deeper into his obsession.

The film is a slow-paced, dreamlike adaptation of the Proust novel. It's somewhat simplified and the dialogue doesn't evoke the depth it's obviously intended to at times. What some would call tedious is actually a brutal and direct view of the deliberate pace of Simon's obsession with Ariane.

Better than Ambien.......2004-12-30

This movie is unbelievably soporific. Apart from the Paris scenery - it lacks any merit - I'm sure that the piece from which Proust is touted to have inspired this boring, self indulgent piece of cinema had redeeming context. This has none. What a waste!

Average customer rating:

Simply Structured Film Feigns South Seas Setting.

Island Captives
Starring: Joan Barclay , John Beck , Henry Brandon , Carmen La Roux , and Eddie Nugent
Director: Glenn Kershner
Manufacturer: Alpha Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B000BITV56
Release Date: 2005-11-29

Customer Reviews:

Simply Structured Film Feigns South Seas Setting........2006-12-23

A rather jumbled work cobbled together from a variety of footage, this adventure tale is ostensibly set upon and near Tahiti, although California's Catalina Island fills in for the latter, with stock footage added from Polynesian sources that depict happy locals in their natural setting, framed against basaltic crags and bluffs, collecting breadfruit, splashing about in the Pacific Ocean, and that sort of thing. Some thick ear playing marks the film, while the plot is actually too complex to be properly handled during the brief duration of this piece that provides approximately 45 minutes of narrative, sans the Polynesian scenes of gamboling, one of which unaccountably is spliced within the middle of the story's climactic moments, apparently to stimulate audience alertness, focussing upon netting of fish, capturing a large sea turtle and other prizes, all with an exotic backdrop. A coffee plantation owner on Tahiti, John Carsons (John Beck), whose high grade crops are particularly valuable, rejects a forceful invitation to join a monopolistic coffee distribution combine, and soon after is murdered as price for his independence, by cartel henchmen while in his own plantation office. John's daughter Helen (Joan Barclay), not aware of her father's slaying, has departed upon a sea voyage to visit him, during which she is wooed by the vessel's radio operator Tom Willoughby (Eddie Nugent), and also by the son, Dick Bannister (Henry Brandon), of the murderous cartel chief, Dick having managed thanks to the screenplay to obtain a convenient method of joining the liner's passenger list, with an intention of persuading Helen, the unknowing heiress, to join up with the international coffee marketing syndicate. After the ship founders against a reef, Helen, along with her two admirers, and an officer, escape to safety in a lifeboat, touching down upon "Mystery Island", near Tahiti, upon which resides, in a seeming geographic vacuum, a clump of ne'er-do-wells, including Kelley (Charles King), a villainous smuggler who has made of the island his private domain. With no supply craft expected for two months, and with lecherous Kelley making portentous advances toward her, Helen gladly accepts Tom's support in addition to the tolerable but unreliable friendship proffered by a local native woman, Taino, performed with her native Mexican cadence by Carmen Laroux, a former mainstay supporting player in Three Stooges short films, cast here as mistress of Kelley of whom she approves in this manner: "..he only beats me once a week, and sometimes gives me presents". Barclay is a talented, undervalued actress, and since her dialogue is unsweetened by any form of originality, she ad libs some delightfully unexpected and witty lines while aboard ship, contributing additional "business" later, thereby crafting a winning performance. Cinematographer Glenn Kershner, whose dramatic closeups are a primary reason for the artistic success of the 1925 Ben Hur, must here largely compromise his aesthetic bent for his only assignment as director, due to an inordinately small budget, but does manage to construct a startling bit of expressionistic camerawork during the shipwreck scene, providing the best sequence of an awkwardly devised film.

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Kimstim Collection: La Captive
Starring: Françoise Bertin , Aurore Clément , Liliane Rovere , Sylvie Testud , and Olivia Bonamy
Director: Chantal Akerman
Manufacturer: Kino Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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