Product Details

• Actors: Daniel Mesguich, Arielle Dombasle, Gabrielle Lazure
• Directors: Alain Robbe-Grillet
• Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: French (Unknown)
• Subtitles: English
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Koch Lorber Films
• DVD Release Date: March 13, 2007
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000LW7KZU
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #83,423 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "La Belle Captive" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

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

Product 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

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a rare find, July 28, 2007

By	Deborah L. Erenberg (FRESH MEADOWS, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

6 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If Lynch and Eisenstein teamed up to do 'Chinatown' as a vampire story, March 28, 2007

By	Thomas J. Rogers "aka Torgo" (Littleton, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

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).

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars mildly amused, April 2, 2007

By	Haring J. Nauta (Galveston, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.