‘That’s a story for me,’ said Akerman of Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner, when she remembered ‘there was that apartment, and the corridor, and the two characters’. This languorous, beguiling adaptation – where, again, Akerman resets our sense of time – probes possessive love. A wealthy young man obsesses over his girlfriend. But who is the captor asks Akerman, who considered a person could be a cage as much as a room.

Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), the widowed mother of a teenage son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), ekes out a drab, repetitive existence in her tiny Brussels apartment. Jeanne's days are divided between humdrum domestic chores -- shopping, cooking, housework -- and her job as an occasional prostitute, which keeps her financially afloat. She seems perfectly resigned to her situation until a series of slight interruptions in her routine leads to unexpected and dramatic changes.