La belle captive

LA BELLE CAPTIVE may be Robbe-Grillet's most entertaining and accomplished film. It dazzles the eye by creating a series of secret encounters inspired by Magritte's surrealist painting, which the director named his film after. You don't have to know anything about art to enjoy this film, though. Motifs from vampire films and erotic thrillers are interwoven with more hermetic scenes, but it's somehow all held together by the repeated image of a black clad woman riding a motorcycle. The central situation of a man on a mysterious sexual mission and some individual scenes bear a striking resemblance to Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999).

An assassin, one Walter Raim, meets a woman in a bar, the mesmerising Marie-Ange van de Reeves (van de Rêves, literally "of dreams"), she leads him to the dance floor, remaining lithe, elusive and anonymous, he becomes obsessed. Sara Zeitgeist, Walter's superior, later meets him at the "Crossroad of Graves" and gives him an urgent mission, a message to be delivered immediately to the Comte de Corinthe. En route he discovers the beautiful Marie-Ange bound, bloody and dishevelled in the road. Later he sleeps with her and she disappears. The rest of the movie is spent in an attempt to understand or recapture what happened, but the past may prove inscrutable, and Walter's memories unfaithful.

The opening credits are shown in the middle of an open picture frame on a beach, looking to the sea. This is a visual quotation of a habitual motif of René Magritte, and is an immediate flag from Robbe-Grillet that the movie is to deal with Magritte's themes, for example, fetishism, the play of the known and knowable versus the unknown and the unknowable (epistemological concerns), identity, and sensuality.

The level of reference to Magritte tends to become obtrusive: there's a Magritte painting in the libertines' mansion, and an overly expositional shot of the title plate beneath the painting (La Belle Captive - after René Magritte); postcards of La Belle Captive make an appearance, as do objects from the painting; general Magrittean objects such as a dressing gown (cross-reference "Philosophy in the Boudoir", privately owned, Washington DC) and people in bowler hats; finally we're told that slippers are fetish objects (cross-reference "La Modèle rouge", Pompidou Centre) whilst people in general are fetishists. I felt that Robbe-Grillet needed to use his own cinematic language more.

Because the movie is a dream-like there are attempts at the uncanny. Two attempts were slightly elephantine, Sara Zeitgeist keeps her motorcycle in her bedroom, and a man with a bicycle talking to Walter starts wheeling it around in circles and jerking it mid-conversation. Somehow these attempts remain compelling even though the seams are showing.

Just when I thought the movie was breaking records for advertent references, the director introduces a new motif, Edouard Manet's The Execution of Emperor Maximilien. It even transpires at the end of the movie that our hero lives in the Rue Edouard Manet, zut alors!

La Belle Captive is removed from the everyday, just as in Magritte's paintings the quotidian is reduced to the bowler hat. This produces the right hermetic atmosphere for contemplation. Marie-Ange is an enigma, in a way in which every woman must be to some extent to men who view them through the lens of sexual objectification (Marie-Ange literally assumes object status when a group of libertines attempt to buy her from Walter). Characters and objects in Magritte's world are alienated, unknowable, I think this is related to his mother's suicide, and his attempts to understand the event. Robbe-Grillet finds in Magritte ideas about perception and memory that very neatly dovetail with his own.

In the film there is a commentary on how we attempt to know people. When we meet people we attempt to find out their names, their background, and their profession. In my opinion in this process we fundamentally miss the point, and bypass any way of meaningfully understand what is individual about the person we talk to. Marie-Ange is reluctant to tell Walter her name, reluctant that he experience anything about her except what is before his own eyes. She is shown later in the movie bound with a golden chain on which is a plate where we see printed her name, as if she has been bound up by the way in which people seek to identify her.

The ending for me is slightly absurd, in that like many other parts of the movie it is overstated. An attempt to view the dreams of Walter by Professor van de Reeves results from clumsy thinking. Magritte's images (bowler hat, apple, forest, etc) are not Freudian symbols that you might actually expect to see in dreams. Magritte expressly said, "In the images I paint, there is no question of either dream, escape, or symbols".

People who are not interested in perception or Magritte, or even the nature of memory can still find things to like in this movie. Sara Zeitgeist, is beautiful, a modish biker clad all in leather with lace frills bursting out at the bust and the cuffs, her body wed to the gleaming chrome of her motorcycle. (I don't know whether its a deliberate reference, but her name Zeitgeist is perhaps a word that symbolises the opposite of Magritte's and Robbe-Grillet's interests, theirs is a logic out of place and time, concerned with what is essential to being a biological perceiving human. It is therefore not uninteresting that she is presented as the angel of death). There is also the music, which is quite good, especially in the bar scene at the start of the movie (produced feelings of ecstasy in me).

This has a little style and some flair and a modicum of interest but in the main it is pretentious tosh without hardly any justification for watching it. It is neither erotically visually exciting or intellectually involving, both of which I am sure it was supposed to be. It is never a good sign when bits of footage are repeated time and again and usually seem a very crude way of making a point or just a way to pad out a very thin story. Did I say 'story'? Now don't get me wrong I don't demand a story but if I am presented with a rather verbose storyline that goes nowhere, I can get a bit fidgety. There are good moments in this and one or two nice shots but there are far too many meaningless shots of the waves and a motorbike. Last Year at Marienbad, can seem slow but it is also poetic and utterly involving, the same cannot be said of this I am afraid.

As if the very broken, uncertain reality of the picture weren't enough, the repetition of shots and scenes and pointedly disjointed sequencing only increase the difficulty of the viewing experience. A complete story is told more or less, but cohesiveness and coherence are variable, and purposefully so. Substantial mystery, with dashes of the supernatural and erotic scattered throughout, is considerably deepened with a guiding ethos for both film-making and storytelling that I can only describe as avant-garde. Comparisons come to mind in one capacity or another, including the works of David Lynch and in some measure Terry Gilliam, but with material such as this comparisons don't mean much after a certain point. I can earnestly say that I enjoyed watching 'La belle captive,' and I think it's worth watching on its own merits in every regard. I also readily admit that if asked I couldn't possibly give a meaningful summary. Mark this without question as a title that will appeal only to those keen on all the wide, weird possibilities of what cinema has to offer.

Whatever one is able to make of the narrative, such as it is, it's fascinating in and of itself and definitely in its abstruseness. All those characteristics that make the experience trying from the very start - some may reasonably say "inscrutable" - are great fun to tease apart, if we can, and one way or another the feature is filled with terrific ideas; say what one will of the plot, the scene writing is outstanding in its robust flavors. Fine a credit as this is for Alain Robbe-Grillet as both director and especially writer, editor Bob Wade had his work cut out for him to assemble the film into a very particular shape, and he did a fantastic job, and much the same can be said for the sound department. The production design and art direction are truly superb, giving the movie an imaginative look and feel, and the hair, makeup, and costume design are just as excellent as those stunts and effects that are employed. 'La belle captive' is a wild, bizarre ride, but it's very well done across the board, quality that makes the picture as easy to digest as it feasibly could be.

It's very much a piece for a niche audience, and I would begrudge no one who engages honestly with it and dislikes it. I had a good time watching but I won't pretend to have a complete grasp of what Robbe-Grillet was intending. Even at that, the medium is perfect for taking viewers on a strange journey, and sometimes that's all a title needs to be to entertain and satisfy. Whether or not one can glean anything greater from 'La belle captive' it remains a splendid curiosity for those able and willing to abide the eccentricity, and a fine way to spend ninety minutes - so long as one bears in mind that it requires active engagement.

Stiff, humourless fantasy in which a chap gets sucked into a surreal nightmare after meeting a woman in a nightclub and finding her dead on the road shortly after. You can sense the writer-director desperately trying to strip away the ordinary meaning of things, only to inadvertently reinforce them by means of allusion and connotation, of which the film is largely comprised, as there's little original here. Much of it seems to be a nod to Melville, with our despondent hero being some kind of secret agent in a raincoat.

It's a game that feels as though it's being made up as it goes along - the girl's a ghost, no she isn't, it was all a dream, no it wasn't - the only interesting thing is the auteur's ulterior motive in making the film. Clearly you can't trust reality, or your idea of it - the ultimate paranoia. If that's it, it's simplistic, and unfortunately it's none too amusing or entertaining, apart from the chick on the bike. Surrealism being some decades past its sell-by date at this point, the sense is of Robbe-Grillet having his finger on the pulse of a cadaver.