Everything about the movie is consciously artificial. Which leads us to wonder if any of it is real, or perhaps we’re expected to wonder what reality even means.
Walter Raim (Daniel Mesguich) works for something called the Organisation but we don’t know what this outfit does. We do know that it’s something secret, or at least secretive. Walter receives an order from his boss Sara Zeitgeist (love the name) to deliver a letter to a French senator, Henri de Corinthe. On the way he finds a young woman lying on the road. There’s some blood on her but she appears to be mostly in shock rather than injured. The odd thing is that she is handcuffed.
He'd met the girl earlier at a night club but she’d told him she didn’t know what her name was (he will later, much later, find out the her name is Marie-Ange).
Walter arrives at a mansion, the Villa Seconde, hoping to find a telephone to call a doctor. There’s a kind of gathering in progress. There are lots of men and they are clearly rich powerful men. They ignore Walter’s pleas and instead start speculating on the price he is going to ask for the girl. Clearly they would all like to buy her and clearly money is no object.
It’s not that they’re overtly excited. They’re too rich, too powerful, too decadent, to betray excitement. I’m assuming that Stanley Kubrick must have seen this film and must have been influenced by this scene to some extent (even possibly to a very large extent) when he made Eyes Wide Shut sixteen years later. La Belle Captive certainly anticipates the decadent eroticism of Kubrick’s film.
Of course you’d expect, if you turned up at someone’s house with a very pretty handcuffed girl, that the immediate response would be to enquire as to why she’s restrained in the matter and to take steps to release her from her bondage. But these guys just think it was clever of Walter to bring her to them handcuffed. Actually they’re not handcuffs - her wrists are bounds with a golden chain. So obviously it could not have been the police who bound her.
The girl behaves oddly as well, meekly bending her head to drink from a glass of something that is offered to her.
Walter is not sure what happens later that night, or why he has a wound on his throat. He thinks he may have slept with the girl.
When he tries to deliver the letter to de Corinthe things get stranger. There are things he needs to find out, so he finds himself acting as a private eye in an old Hollywood movie (complete with trench-coat and fedora). Inspector Francis offers no help but does give him a postcard - off Magritte’s paining La Belle Captive. He returns to the Villa Seconde to find that it’s nothing but a ruin. He tries to talk to the neighbours but all he finds next door is a mad girl. He does find out some things at the night club but those things make everything much more puzzling and bizarre.
He finds one of the girl’s shoes. Later he finds the other shoe. And later still he finds the third shoe of the pair.
If you’ve seen any of Robbe-Grillet’s other films you won’t be surprised by the surrealism and deliberate artificiality or by the sense that what we’re seeing may not be what it appears to be, and may not be real, or may be real but not in the way we usually think of reality. La Belle Captive has obvious affinities to his much earlier Trans-Europ-Express which was a blending of art-house and pulp crime thriller/spy thriller elements. In this film there’s also a hint of the classic private eye thriller. Walter might be playing the rôle of Philip Marlowe, or perhaps Lemmy Caution.
Daniel Mesguich is excellent, playing Walter as a man who is both over-confident and hopelessly confused. Gabrielle Lazure brings the right mix of disturbing sexuality and mystery to the rôle of Marie-Ange. Cyrielle Clair is suitably enigmatic as Sara Zeitgeist. Is she a conspirator, an innocent bystander or a victim? Sara does like her motorcycles. She keeps two of them in her bedroom.
If you’re familiar with Robbe-Grillet’s work you also won’t be surprised by the kinky eroticism. If there are no hints of sado-masochism it just isn’t a proper Robbe-Grillet film.
The Villa Seconde set is all creepy decadence. There are a lot of beach scenes, appropriate given the subject matter of Magritte’s painting but fans of French surrealist cinema will also be reminded of the many beach scenes in Jean Rollin’s films.
This movie does have some very Rollin-esque touches. Rollin and Robbe-Grillet were, in my view, the two masters of French cinematic surrealism - a distinctively subtle sort of erotically charged surrealism.
There are also touches of sly humour. Robbe-Grillet may be arty but he has a sense of fun which is easily overlooked.
I first saw this film twelve years ago, but that was the old and not very satisfactory non-anamorphic Koch Lorber DVD release. Seeing it again but in the Olive Films Blu-Ray release makes a huge difference. The Olive Films release is anamorphic and is superior in every way. Sadly there are no extras aside from a trailer. This is a movie that would have benefited enormously from an audio commentary. Anyone new to Robbe-Grillet’s work or unfamiliar with surrealism might be a little bewildered by it all. Robbe-Grillet has that effect on some people. Once you’ve seen a few of his movies they start to make a lot more sense.
You don’t have to make sense of La Belle Captive to enjoy it but if you like films that do make sense there is a plausible plot resolution at the end. There is an important clue midway through as to what’s really going on, or at least to the most likely explanation.
A fascinating visually arresting movie. Very highly recommended.
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