A la Recherche du Cinema

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 3, 2000 | by Rex Roberts

Director Raul Ruiz translates writer Marcel Proust to film -- Time Regained, a mediation on memory and experience, reaffirms the French author's belief in belles lettres.

Can a filmmaker turn a 3,000-page novel into a two-and-one-half-hour movie -- a novel that took the author more than two decades to write, that chronicles events almost a century old and that explores epistemological ephemera such as memory and time? Director Raul Ruiz has attempted something of the sort with Time Regained, a 155-minute motion picture based on the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, the celebrated novel cycle by Marcel Proust.

Proust worked for years on In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu, formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past), beginning in 1906 when he began to revise an unpublished novel he already had spent eight years writing. He would publish Swann's Way, the first installment of his great project, in 1913, with other books appearing periodically up to and after his death in 1922. Proust won France's prestigious literary award, the Goncourt Prize, in 1919, and since has become an icon of modern literature, but he is less well-known, and less read, than James Joyce and his other contemporaries, in part because In Search of Lost Time demands such a commitment in time.

That said, Proust is en vogue, with two new 900-plus-page biographies appearing this year, as well as a "field guide" to the novel cycle. Penguin is planning a new edition of In Search of Lost Time that employs seven translators, a development much anticipated by the newly convened Proust Society of America. Most of its members will surely flock to see Time Regained, which opens June 16 in New York and later this summer across the United States.

Proust himself was en vogue during the Belle Epoque in Paris. The delicate son of a wealthy doctor -- and as such a member of the bourgeois -- he traded on his promise as a budding litterateur to mingle among the haut monde, where he gathered his material for his monumental novel. While much of In Search of Lost Time satirizes the vanity, snobbery and sexual peccadilloes of French society at the turn of the century, Proust was interested in grander themes -- the interplay between internal and external reality, or memory and experience, and the possibility of transcendence through art ... in his case, through literature.

The psychological nature of In Search of Lost Time doesn't seem ripe for cinema, but Ruiz has made a film that, in style anyway, captures something of the discursive novel. "As an adaptation, it is faithful to the spirit of Proust, but you can see the film without having read him," says the Chileanborn director who sought political asylum in France after the fall of Allende's government in 1973. "I am less interested in the aristocracy than Proust was, since the aristocracy is less absorbing these days."

In fact, Time Regained is wonderful to watch -- beautifully filmed by cinematographer Richard Aronovich -- even if American audiences must depend on English subtitles to follow a complicated story told in flashbacks that follow no set chronology. Ruiz begins his film with Proust on his death bed recalling his past one more time, the characters in his feverish memories, like those in his novel, drawn from people the author has known during his life.

For example (to offer some taste of Proust-a-la-Ruiz), there's the narrator himself, referred to as Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella), who once was in love with Gilberte (Emmanuelle Beart), who is married to Saint-Loup (Pascal Greggory), a duke having affairs with a former prostitute, Rachel (Elsa Zylberstein), as well as a brilliant pianist, Morel (Vincent Perez), who in turn is cavorting with Charlus (John Malkovich), a worldly baron who may or may not have had an affair with Odette (Catherine Deneuve), a worldly woman related by marriage to Marcel and now his intimate confidante.

Even audiences familiar with Proust can get lost among the ruins of this overrefined society, the bombs of World War I beating out its death knell. But Ruiz isn't concerned with conventional narrative here, as much as with the flow of images and mixture of visual metaphors. Characters walk through doors that open, not to different rooms, but to different moments of time; alabaster statues, stand-ins for the artist's muses and his creations, drift from scene to scene, from a drawing room in a grand chateau to the beach at a seaside resort; elaborate tracking shots and moving sets suggest the fluidity of experience present and past.

"The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion," is how Vladimir Nabokov described Proust's work, and his words could apply to Ruiz's film, too. Aided by superb performances from his actors, the director does manage to suggest something of the author's sense of loss in a protean world, and his euphoria at creating work that might outlast life's mutations. Time Regained the film may be a modest achievement compared to Time Regained the novel, but the movie is an elegant attempt to translate one medium to another -- and it's a good introduction to a difficult author for an audience increasingly content to rent the classics on video.