When Chantal Akerman takes on La Prisonnière, the fifth part of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, she finds herself on familiar ground: the confinement of two characters trapped in a closed setting, desire, adolescent sexuality, and jealousy. “I read Proust in bits and pieces when I was quite young,” she said. “Then I reread him after making Jeanne Dielman. With La Prisonnière, I immediately thought: this is about an obsession, it takes place in an apartment… it’s for me. The whole book was very important because it deals with subjects that have since become significant—namely France and the Dreyfus Affair, France and gender studies, and history: how the bourgeoisie dreamed only of aristocracy, and how the aristocracy dreamed only of money and thus had to mix with the bourgeoisie.” She also clarified her choices for the film adaptation—credited as “Inspired by Marcel Proust”—in which the narrator becomes a character named Simon, Albertine becomes Ariane, and the action unfolds in an undefined time period: “I wanted to create a mental world rather than depict a specific era. To focus on matter, light, walls, bodies. This meant removing as many anecdotal elements as possible in order to generate a sense of unease that sends each viewer back to their own interiority.” And to convey through film what animates the book—its writing, both free and at times very close to the text: “To truly adapt it, you have to filter Proust through yourself, and favor an approach I would call minimal rather than minimalist. Perhaps the film is minimalist compared to the book, but at the same time it’s a proliferating film, made up of many elements. I wanted to get to the bone of this story and of the text, to its very core—so I took only a small part of the book to reach the heart of the subject.”
N.F.