Die schöne Gefangene

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.

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.

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.

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).