Il tempo ritrovato

At long, long last. In a year of false hopes and broken promises, here is the real thing, a genuine cinematic masterpiece that after one viewing you've only read the introduction. It's everything that art-house cinema is accused of - elitist, over-intellectual, precious, elliptical, methodically paced, privileging mise-en-scene over virtues like plot or motivated characterisation. It is also a model of literary adaptation that will hopefully, once and for all, put certain practitioners out of business; the most visually astonishing (not in the sense of merely beautiful, but achieving effects you didn't think possible), funny and emotional film in years, and the first new film I've wanted to squeeze to my heart since CHUNGKING EXPRESS.

In one way at least, it's even an improvement on Proust's sublime novel, which frequently breaks off to offer remarkable guides on how to write and to live life. These are indispensable to anyone who wants to exist to the full as a human being, but, uncorrected when Proust died, they are often wearingly repetitive and confused.

Ruiz finds economical, jaw-dropping, incisive ways to show what Proust wanted to say. Because this isn't anything so common as a film of the book - it is an interpretation, a deconstruction, a reimagining. Proust, like Nabokov, sets traps for the unwary reader, and because the narrator seems so convincingly Proustian in the detail, it's easy to confuse him with Proust in the spirit. But M. is a deeply flawed, unreliable narrator who does not always see what's in front of him, who, riven by jealousy, prejudice, snobbery, malady and self-laceration, is not always the most objective observer.

Ruiz emphasises this by foregrounding the seeming differences between himself and Proust as artists: Proust advocates an active, conscious reclamation of ourselves and our pasts; Ruiz, a Surrealist, explores the Unconscious. Proust was the most notorious rewriter in the history of literature, every sentence subjected to the most rigourous scrutiny, yet he died without fully revising Le Temps Retrouve. This leaves the text filled with gaps, omissions, contradictions, 'mistakes', slips, an ultimate loss of control - the perfect ground for a Surrealist excavation.

Ruiz reveals M.'s essential powerlessness, his yielding to the power of the Unconscious; M. thinks he makes a decision to discover the past; Ruiz shows from the very beginning of the film, how he has no choice.

What Surrealism does best is to show the terrifying instability of the seemingly stable, everyday, domestic, fixed. This fits in with Proust's project, because his stepping outside of Time shows how amorphous Time is. A centuries-old society, with huge mansions and manors, inhabited by fixed personnages with fixed names and personalities, in a significant period (the Belle Epoque giving onto World War One) is actually shown to be deeply unstable, perceived as it is though the mind of M., who is constantly changing - his social status his body (through sickness), his self-perception and view of the world and of literature etc.

The opening sequence is masterly illustrative. The real Proust lies in the near-dark in bed, wheezingly ill, reciting his work to his faithful servant, Celeste. Here is an image of wholeness, fact, legend - a great writer writes his great book. But the scene is riven with instability: Proust lies immobile in his bed, while his objects and ornaments move freely around the room.

This is a motif that reverberates throughout the film, the elegant freedom of the dominating, crowding bibelots, and the rigid, sterile, geometrical movements of the people who are supposed to own them. But it also shows a heartening split between mind and body: while the latter lies inert and dying, the former remains vibrant and transformative.

Where to begin with Ruiz's awe-inspiring masterwork? The sublime play with mirrors and cameras, revealing great truths about perception, deception, mediation, objectivity, subjectivity, revelation and concealment? The play of different selves throughout the film, where the monstrously aged, through memory, can return to their former beautiful selves, culminating in an astonishing climactic sequence where M. in his three guises (protagonist/narrator of the film (even this is split, narrated in voiceover by a different person), the author of the book-film, and himself as a young man that allows the other two to exist) as he wanders, Alice-like (a haunting, Surrealist presence thoughout the film) through the classical ruins of time, linked to the impossibility of one, fixed work of art?

The complex analysis of role-play, on the one hand liberating one from a fixed self, on the other repressing one (in terms of social positoin, reputation etc.)? The role of of reenactment in the recovery of the past, and its transmutation through subjective perception? The subtle changes and omissions that Ruiz deliberately employs to interrogate the emphasis of Proust's work? The connection between voyeurism (existing in a society like being imprisoned in a panopoticon), and the necessary observation of the artist to reveal truth?

Ruiz's canny casting, emphasising allusive qualities, e.g. mother and daughter Deneuve, and a hero played by a man with a similar name to their lover/husband? Alain Robbe-Grillet, doyen of formal games in country houses? Edith Scob, Franju muse of broken, fragile beauty, playing dessicated Oriane? the link between the narrator, director Patrice Chereau, and two of the film's stars who have also appeared in one of his films?

The profusion of different artforms which combine to create a moment of such great emotion that I, with M. cried? The teasing play between the protagonist, his creator and this film's creator? The amusing variations on the theme of prostitution? The film's action actually only consists of three elaborate episodes, but the plot floods with the past and the future, the real and imagined, the fictional and historical (or, more correctly, meta-fictional), theory and practice.

It should not be forgotten that there are other, simpler pleasures beloved of historical-film fans - the country-houses with their astonishing avenues; the town mansions with their vast halls; the choreography of the party scenes; the sublime costumes; the elaborate recreation of a time and place. The film is very funny as well as deeply emotional, and though pawns in a Surrealist game, the wonderful actors reveal great depth, although Marcello Mazzerella stands out as a hero more sympathetic than Proust's. But it is Ruiz who is the real star, locating the hidden meaning of the book with startling, disturbing, enigmatic, elegantly polished images, as well as a rare ravishing feel for both nature and artifice.

Ruiz was quite something back in the 80's, one of the most promising filmmakers I have recently discovered. He made films that throbbed with magic volition, with steps travelling inwards to the place where images are born. It was a dangerous cinema, sultry with the impossible.

Then came the second phase, the period of maturity as it were. More prestigious films starting in the mid-90's, starring actors of standing (Mastroyanni, Huppert, here Deneuve and Malkovich) and with some clout of respectability. Watching these makes me cherish so much more the spontaneous upheaval of Three Crowns or City of Pirates.

So, this is the landmark film of that second phase, a bulky, sprawling film about French writer Marcel Proust and his work. About sprawling deathbed recollections of a life lived, arranged into a story about stories in an attempt to reveal something of their machinations (and ours in weaving them in the mind, before or after the event).

It is a noble effort, with multiple points of interest.

Oh the sets are sumptuous, roomfuls of an impeccably dressed society at the doorstep of disaster—WWI is booming away in close proximity—who mingle in coquetry at the clinking sounds of fine glassware. Vice as the last means of sating a self that can never seem to please itself. Bunuel stuff.

Charmingly amusing tidbits abound, sure—a scene at the funeral, for example, of a decorated general, whose wife takes solace in a stash of letters she discovered written by the deceased brave. We know, of course, that the love pouring out of them was no doubt intended for his secret homosexual lover.

Now all of this as memory, with the narrator present and included in the scene of it. And then a camera—the internal narrator of memory—that introduces the distorted distance of time, this is quite marvelous, as actually reordering reality—furniture move around on whims, our narrator. Fine stuff so far.

But, this really falls with Proust's ideas on the role of fiction, the thinking man so hopelessly removed from the actual, tangible things of life, that he can only find solace in turning them to their spiritual equivalents. Who instead of loving, can only write about love; who wastes the manifold possibilities of 'now!' in tinkering with dead time.

Earlier filmmakers astutely exposed this destructive facet for what it is; a chimera of the mind that traps the soul in old films of memory. Resnais in his fascinating overall project about memory, Antonioni in Blowup, earlier yet it was film noir. Beckett has captured the dissication better than anyone, pungent stuff his. Ruiz by contrast romances the idea as though it was a pleasant stroll. He romances it so earnestly that it drains his entire film.

It is all so fine—like the glassware—so refined and pliable with some grace of apparent form. But a form refined to the point of ornament and sofness, mere trinket that is hollow and devoid of life. No other filmmaker once promising I can think of, matured into so much indifference.

TIME REGAINED

(Fr., dir. Raul Ruiz, 165 min.) doesn't even pretend to stand on its own; is an homage useless and unintelligible to anyone who hasn't read and remembered Remembrance of Things Past. Having digested only the first 2 of the 7 novels which comprise this opus, and this long enough ago to have allowed memory of them to deteriorate, I confess much of the film remained beyond me. But even with the book as scorecard, the film functions as hardly more than a metasoap opera, a costume pageant of the book's characters who parade by, talk and walk, without ever coming to life.

Nothing much happens onscreen; the movie is practically void of action. Despite impeccable staging, it consists largely of one conversation after another, endless scenes of dinners, lunches, social gatherings, etc., in which people dispassionately discuss events and relationships that have already transpired elsewhere. To make up for this, Ruiz moves furniture about, has near and far fields migrate disjointedly in opposite directions, litters the screen with symbols and leitmotivs, and mingles different times in the same frame, so that, like Bruce Willis in Disney's Kid, Proust observes, is observed by, and even converses with his younger self. Scenes shift so fluidly back and forth through time that one easily gets lost, disoriented, unless thoroughly familiar with the book.

The movie fails, has to fail, because of the impossibility of translating the book to film. The book is too introverted, too subjective, too fundamentally static and multilayered. Cinema-time is linear and dynamic; even though it can create the illusion of multiple things happening at once, it is restricted to a sequence of events, actions, happening one after another, one at a time, all of which are, above all, visual, graphic, right there before your eyes. The novel, however, layers the past on the present so that the two effectively coexist, are simultaneous; and delves into subjective states and ideas, interweaves mood, reminiscence, and philosophizing inseparably with place and person. The subject of time and memory, as elusive and evocative as it is on the page, is near nigh impossible to get hold of with film, that most literal and physical of mediums. It's like trying to photograph the passage of mist, of fog--all you see is a mess of grey.

The movie also fails because it can only gloss the myriad details with which the novels slowly, deliberately mount their magnificent edifice. In the end, all you get here is a rushed visit, a mad dash through a museum of images, a disordered travelogue of the psyche.

nothing could take the place of proust's terrific words, but i felt exhilaration through the whole film. like the comedy in proust's voluminous in search of lost time (as in his writing is so good you have to be joyous), the surrealism, images, direction, and overall focus of the film are great fun - the scene in the brothel where marcel searches for a chair to stand on is precious, as is the slippery audience of the violin and piano recital scene.

a couple of other comments without negating the masterpieceness of the film: acting wise, mazzarella looks like proust and doesn't say much, malkovich steals scenes, and deneuve, beart, perez, and the rest don't act as much as model seriously. except pascal's saint loup's discourse while devouring his dinner, another hoot.

secondly, this is a hell of a challenging film (i'm not fronting like i read proust extensively, i'm only up to within a budding grove). i didn't know what was going on and who was who thanks to time jumps, surrealism, subtitles, and the slew of characters. i enjoyed the film as wonderful filmmaking and comedy. repeated viewings might make things a little clearer. regardless, it's difficult and memorable.

one love to you all, thanks.

This ambitious attempt to convey the spirit and content of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is largely successful, in my view, for it faithfully reflects the impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness quality of the epic work of literature. There is no logical plot or or narrative arc because Proust's work is something altogether different from the classical novel.

My best guess is that those who dislike this film have never read the books, which is admittedly difficult to do, and for the very same reasons: no hooks, no turning points, nothing remotely resembling the classical notion of "story". The work is basically a pastiche of memories and dreams. What matter above all in the film are the images, and they are extremely well done. Great cinematography and good acting all around. Bravo!

"La viande est bonne!"