A Bela Prisioneira

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.

This is the second Robbe-Grillet movie i watch, first one was "L'immortelle". I think "La belle captive" is slightly better. To be precise, i can't tell for sure this is objectively better, i just liked it more, even though, as it seems, ""L'immortelle"" has a better reputation. Definitely, visually wise, it was superior. However, "La belle captive" seems to me more coherent and accessible. Not that it makes sense - it doesn't. After all, it's Robbe-Grillet. But i could empathize more with the characters and there is something else : The mysteries here are just an excuse. Most important thing is the leading character. Whereas in other mystery movies with no resolution, viewer gets frustrated, in this movie, mysteries are not that important. Leading character's journey is the most important thing here and his reactions to all the weirdness around him.

I know that my review is not helpful at all. In conclusion : If you like art drama/mystery movies, something like a French David Lynch in his most bizarre but not that intriguing, you will like it as well.

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).

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.