Film: Proustitution - Marcel Proust's novel adapted

National Review, July 17, 2000 by John Simon

Worse yet are Ruiz's arrogant, irrelevant, alienating additions to Proust's text, "interludes of pure fantasy, not found anywhere in Proust," as Shattuck puts it. So, for example, near the movie's beginning, the child Marcel enters a vast hall (the film, as usual, is vague about time and place), its floor paved in very large black-and- white tiles on which, symmetrically disposed, lie upturned top hats with white kid gloves partly hanging out of them. Marcel now proceeds toward an adult looking out of a sort of Gothic window at the far end of the hall. The boy sometimes walks, sometimes hops and skips over the hats in a kind of hopscotch. Near film's end, the adult Marcel (or Proust) leaves the party to enter that same hall for the same trajectory, but this time without hopping. What on earth does this mean or contribute?

Cinematic hommages may be intended. In wartime Paris, on a wall behind the main action, a projected combat newsreel shows a dying horse, which Shattuck perceives as "an oblique allusion to Bunuel and Dali's film Un Chien andalou . . . Ruiz, I infer, wanted to flash his surrealist credentials." Maybe so, but maybe it's also a way of showing how these shallow characters ignored the horrors of war. Maybe, too, Time Regained's ending at the beach "with a walk-out-to-sea sequence" is indeed "lifted from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice," or, more likely, Visconti's movie version of it. But whatever it is, why?

Ricardo Aronovich has shot the opulent production and costume design with condign lushness. The Narrator is played by an obscure Italian actor, Marcello Mazzarella, who looks like Proust with an elongated jaw, and whose voice is supplied by the well-known director Patrice Chereau. The notorious Baron de Charlus is John Malkovich, who taped his lines in his bad French; then they were taped, at his speed but correctly, by an obscure French actor with a similar voice imitating Malkovich's; then Malkovich taped them again imitating the Frenchman. Out of this agglomerate the sound track yields a painfully slow- speaking and foreign-sounding Charlus, which, combined with Mal kovich's lack of style, emerges absurd. Another problem is the French ac tress Arielle Dom basle, totally unconvincing as an American.

Catherine Deneuve as Odette, Emmanuelle Beart as Gilberte, Vincent Perez as Morel, Marie-France Pisier as Mme Verdurin, and most others are fine; only Pascal Greggory falls short-he is not aristocratic enough for Saint-Loup. Jorge Arriagada's music is good, even when, as required, itimitates Faure. If only the movie's overall imitatio n of Proust were more convincing!