La belle captive

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).

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.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, in his post-MARIENBAD career, has made a decent living for himself combining his structuralist maze-narratives with skin, guns, black leather, trapezes and motorcycles. In short he has managed to wedge one of the artiest of art-movie genres into the Erotic Thriller shelf of your local video store. (But don't expect to see any Robbe-Grillets there soon.) Before a dismal tail-off (it was all a dream! or was it? no, it was! or was it?) Robbe-Grillet manages to solder together a pleasing array of rhymes, repetitions, hangovers, frames-within-frames, and other toylike devices which he wisely powers with High Surrealist fuel: dreamlike sexual obsessiveness. The first twenty minutes or so of LA BELLE CAPTIVE combine story elements from EYES WIDE SHUT and KISS ME DEADLY--a winning combination (and one that suggests more that Robbe-Grillet read Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle" than that Kubrick jacked Robbe-Grillet's conception). As always in Robbe-Grillet, the combination of elegant, "meaningless," self-referential puzzling with lurid, charged material makes for a powerful experience--Andre Breton 2.0. Too bad that, unlike his late, masterly THE BLUE VILLA (still shamefully undistributed), LA BELLE CAPTIVE cops out so shamefully. One must now acknowledge, after LA BELLE CAPTIVE, Antonioni's IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN, EYES WIDE SHUT and MULHOLLAND DRIVE, that the Cheesy Erotic Thriller is now the dominant paradigm of the Western art film.

Very much like Alain Robbe-Grillet's other films in its fractured narrative, sexual and psychological preoccupations, and sense of ambiguity, except it's appallingly poor when compared to the tremendously entertaining "Trans-Europ-Express" and the fever-dream S&M world of "Eden and After". This is a film which like some of Godard's lesser work mistakes making references to art and intellectuals for actual substance, except Robbe-Grillet is no Godard and hence could never possibly have pulled off making a film which featured his own filmic language in spite of including countless references to the work of others. "La belle captive" is like poorly-shot, cheap version of a David Lynch film, and just about the only good thing I can say about it is that it made me feel like watching "Eyes Wide Shut" again. Sadly, the headache this piece of crap gave me will make doing that less enjoyable.

Everything in this film is blurred and everything is ambiguous and shaky. The main character, Walter Raim, who is, or probably isn't, some kind of secret service agent, meets, or probably doesn't meet, a beautiful and strange woman. And everything what's happening probably isn't happening at all and after every episode he tries to understand, did it happen or not and if it really did happen then what was it? But slowly and inexorably everything moves to the finish which is as incredible as all the occurrences in this picturesque drama. While so many films are adapted from a certain story The Beautiful Prisoner is based on the paintings by René François Ghislain Magritte and is as much surrealistic with the same striking shift of reality. On the side of the visual art this film is simply fantastic.