A Bedroom Story

The films of Chantal Akerman explore one of the key issues in the representation of female desire: the debate about the mechanisms of a language which, according to Laura Mulvey, is based on a male gaze founded on scopophilia, voyeurism, and fetishism. This article uses the film La captive (2000) and the desire between its two protagonists, Ariane and Simon, to reconsider the link established in feminist theory between language, the gaze, and desire. My hypothesis is that the confinement of Akerman’s female protagonist, expressed through the two dimensions of submission and intimacy, takes an approach to female desire that constitutes an alternative to the forms of the gaze associated with the male tradition of representation. This approach engages in a close dialogue with the concept of desire posited by Emmanuel Levinas, whose ideas had a huge influence on Akerman’s understanding of how to film the Other, as well as the relationship between the image and its observer.