`Time Regained” — Raul Ruiz’s adaptation of the seventh and last volume of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” — is an odd and exquisite triumph, a movie of such ravishing complexity, sophistication and intelligence that, even as you watch it unfold voluptuously on screen, you may marvel that it was made at all, much less made this well.
Bravo! The film, which shows Proust’s upper-class Parisian world and tormented life as a many-faceted gallery of belles, dandies, homosexuals, matriarchs and monsters, is almost rapturously well executed.
Beautiful to look at, stimulating to contemplate, brilliantly acted (by a cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich and Emmanuelle Beart) and made with deep sympathy, inspiration and unusual understanding, Ruiz’s “Time Regained” takes one of the most defiantly intricate and hermetically personal novels of the 20th Century and makes its translation to cinema look effortless and inevitable. Ruiz, one of the most prolific of all world filmmakers, has never made a film as good, and few other current French directors have matched him. Yet “Time Regained,” unfortunately, is not a picture that will instantly communicate all its delights to every audience. Wondrously rich as it is, many viewers will have to work to appreciate (or sometimes even grasp) all of “Time’s” curious glories. Unlike Volker Schlondorff’s visually lush but heavily criticized 1984 “Swann in Love” (which was based on “Swann’s Way,” the first volume of “Remembrance”) “Time Regained” may appeal more strongly to audiences familiar with Proust’s writing than to the non-initiates. Devotees of Proust should admire or at least respect Ruiz’s efforts; newcomers may be confused, dazzled or annoyed.
But why should we restrict ourselves, in life or film, to only those things that come easily? This is one film well worth the effort. I’ve seen it twice, once at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998 and once here, and its pleasures, like those of the novel, only increase with time and repetition. Ruiz, the Chilean-born, French-based filmmaker who specializes in ambitiously literary or radical subjects, has constructed his “Time” as a grand contemplation of Proust’s biography and art.
A musical exploration of his themes, and a lavishly detailed window on his old world, it is a film built on reverie — on memory, subjectivity, deliberate distortion or hallucination. Time has been fractured and reordered, torn out of sequence.
Events tumble madly after each other, sliding from one era to the next, out of joint. In a recurring, delicately nightmarish image, the young Marcel glides impossibly through his surroundings, transported as if by an invisible camera-crane of memory.
Our guide through the labyrinth of the story is Proust himself, whom we see first in his famous cork-lined sickroom, surrounded by memorabilia and photographs. He is “Time’s” off-screen narrator (voiced by actor-director Patrice Chereau of “La Reine Margot”), and the younger “Marcel” is also onscreen, played, almost silently, by Marcello Mazzarella, with his trim beard and starchy clothes, floating through the film in a languid pose that’s almost a double for photos of the real-life Proust. The film’s Marcel, as it turns out, is the ultimate witness: disengaged, passive, almost the least interesting of Proust’s high-born gallery. But he is also the observer and memoirist whose side we never leave.
Character and milieu are everything in Proust’s book — and in the movie as well. The actors are wondrously well-picked matches for their roles: agelessly lovely Catherine Deneuve as the promiscuous adventuress Odette de Crecy; enigmatic Chiara Mastroianni (Deneuve’s daughter) as Marcel’s great love, Albertine; sinfully seductive Emmanuelle Beart as his other great love, the opportunistic Gilberte; vulpine Pascal Gregory as the predatory aristocrat Saint-Loup; devilishly handsome Vincent Perez as the low-born hustler and pianist Morel; and shining-eyed Marie-France Pisier as the busybody art patroness Madame Verdurin.
Most astonishingly, there is a tour-de-force performance by an American actor, Steppenwolf’s great oddball John Malkovich in the part of the chronicle’s single most famous figure, the decaying gay dilettante Baron de Charlus. Alain Delon stole “Swann in Love” as Charlus; and Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, in their grand, sadly unrealized Proust project, wanted Marlon Brando as their Baron. But Malkovich, despite his imperfectly accented French, makes the part his own. As Charlus wanders rakishly through his night world of license and sensuality, his eyes glitter with decadent glee. His voice is a spewing fountain of sibilant wit. And when he collapses in disease and age in the film’s last dreamlike section, his decrepitude is etched with joy and acid. Deneuve, Beart and the others glow with sensual fire, ravish you on screen. But Malkovich embodies the novel’s poignant and embittered view of life — and of the homosexuality that was Proust’s carefully phrased, sometimes-disguised subject.
The hero of the movie, as in the novel, is consciousness itself. And, in a way, the hero is also art: Proust’s literary genius and, in this case, the brilliance of Ruiz and his collaborators, especially cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich and production designer Bruno Beauge. And just as important is the magnificent cast — fully exposing the characters’ outer beauty and inner rot. The characters of this doomed haut monde may be weak, venal, deceptive or petty, but the perspective is always vast, clear and, in a strange way, compassionate.
Perhaps it’s because Proust’s world was so rich, frivolous and self-absorbed that he sought to redeem it with expansive and lusciously detailed literary art. His vision was so lucid that his subjects were exposed in all their folly and corruption. But the act of remembrance has grandeur, pity, depth. It overwhelms us. “Time Regained” is a testament to both a vanished world and the power of art to preserve and re-create life. In these dancing images, and in this iridescent light, Ruiz recaptures Proust’s lost time and makes it sing.
`TIME REGAINED’
(star)(star)(star) (star)
Directed by Raul Ruiz; written by Gilles Taurand and Ruiz, based on the novel “Time Regained” from the cycle “Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust; photographed by Ricardo Aronovich; edited by Denise de Casabianca; production designed by Bruno Beauge; music by Jorge Arriagada; produced by Paulo Branco. A Kino International release; opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre. Running time: 2:45. No MPAA rating (adult situations, discreetly presented). French and English, subtitled.
THE CAST
Marcel ………….. Marcello Mazzarella
Odette de Crecy ….. Catherine Deneuve
Gilberte ………… Emmanuelle Beart
Baron de Charlus …. John Malkovich
Morel …………… Vincent Perez
Albertine ……….. Chiara Mastroianni
