If Ruiz emphasizes the Proustian theme of time, Chantal Akerman focuses on Proust’s reflections on love in this variation on La prisonnière set in the present day. Her updated story of the jealous love of Proust’s narrator for the alternately passive and elusive Albertine plays on the book’s depictions of love as cruel, self-defeating, altruistic, a source of both bliss and despair and, above all, obsessive. In a Parisian apartment of faded elegance, a young man and woman enact rites of seduction, punishment and rejection, seemingly cut off from the rest of the world, except for the man’s grandmother and the woman’s friends with whom – to her partner’s chagrin – she devotes much time. In keeping with Proust’s own fascination with gender fluidity and ambiguity, neither male nor female entirely settle into the roles of bearer and object of the gaze. The young man is both subject and object, for the audience and for himself. As for her, who knows? Hence the surveillance of his lover undertaken by the young man, which certainly recalls Vertigo, but Akerman herself has pointed to her celebrated Jeanne Dielman as another of this film’s predecessors: obscure rituals and repressed sexuality in the huis clos of a single apartment.