Ariane lives with Simon in his large Paris flat. Simon is obsessed with her: he wants to know everything about her, secretly follows her when she goes out, asks questions all the time, even in the most intimate moments. Ariane seems to take it all in stride, but Simon realises that she's hiding something.
Direction
Akerman's static frames turn apartments into prisons of watching.
Acting
Testud's unreadable surface—complicity or survival? You decide.
Cinematography
Mirror shots that fracture identity until you're not sure who's watching whom.
Director
Chantal Akerman
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Akerman radically rewrites Proust's 'La Prisonnière'—Albertine becomes complicit, even dominant, flipping the novel's power dynamics entirely.
The apartment was Akerman's own, and she shot in chronological order so the actors' real exhaustion would mirror the characters' unraveling.
FR
