Marcel Proust is back in Cannes again! And on his name alone the house is sure to be packed with francophiles for the Directors' Fortnight screening of Chantal Akerman's La Captive (The Captive), based loosely on Proust's "La Prisonnière" (The Prisoner). So it was last year for Raoul Ruiz's Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained), based on his seven-volume work, Remembrance Of Things Past (written between 1913 and 1927). And so it was back in 1981, when Percy Adlon's debut feature film Célèste appeared in the German series ­ it drew an overflow French crowd from off the street to the Cinéma Le Français on the Rue d'Antibes.

Based on an autobiography of Proust's housemaid, who recounted the living and working habits of the French writer, Célèste starred Eva Mattes in the title role. Two years later, Volker Schloendorff's screen adaptation of Proust's Swann's Way (1983) premiered in the competition. An opulent production starring Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti, it went down in the books that year as one of the festival's major events.

Chantal Akerman, born in 1950 in Brussels, ranks as one of the world's leading women film-makers, one as at home in America as she is in Europe. Her first film, Saute Ma Ville (Blow Up My Town) (1968), was made at age 18 and starred herself in a kind of letter-writing format. That spurred at least one leading critic of feminist cinema to view her oft-employed epistolary style as "a series of love letters to the mother". A better index of her vision and style, though, comes from an interview: "When I saw Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot Le Fou, I realised that film was a language as strong as literature can be. I have not seen Pierre Le Fou since that time, so I cannot even say what it was that had such an effect on me, but it was like talking to one person."

Among her 35 films to date ­ shorts, documentaries and features ­ are some quite extraordinary contributions to both personal and feminist cinema: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Dis-Moi (Tell Me) (1980), Histoires D'Amerique (1989) and the semi-autobiographical Portrait D'Une Jeune Fille De La Fin Des Années 60 À Bruxelles (Portrait Of A Young Girl At The End Of The 1960s In Brussels) (1993).

Her latest, The Captive, is thus as much Akerman as it is Proust. Ariane (Sylvie Testud) lives with Simon (Stanislas Merhar) in a plush Paris apartment. Simon, a possessive type, wants to know everything about her, following her everywhere and subjecting her to endless questioning. The fact that Ariane has a taste for women only unnerves him all the more, for he now feels powerless to deal with a woman leading a double life. And that's a typical Proustian dilemma to mull over.

Ron Holloway