(2000; Le Temps Retrouvé, French) A cinematic glimpse, from director Raul Ruiz (employing numerous artifices of his visual craft to create surrealistic scenes, flashbacks, imagery associations, repetitions and jarring juxtapositions), into the mind of the author of Remembrance of Things Past.

After a dictation session to Céleste from his bed inside his cork-lined bedroom on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, the ailing French novelist, suffering most of his life from asthma and nervous disorders, Marcel Proust (Marcello Mazzarella), using a magnifying glass, looks over photographs of his family and friends. We are plunged into a flood of memories, the complicated social music of Proust's life (1871-1922) and fiction (he spent the final fourteen years of his life writing the sixteen books comprising his masterpiece, A la recherché de temps perdu, largely in self-imposed exile from society to avoid distractions), which to the uninitiated seems confusingly chaotic, as would be the stream of consciousness of anyone with whom we're not well acquainted.

(At least a summary of the novel, such as I've read in William Rose Benét's The Reader's Encyclopedia, and from which I've drawn many details for this review, would be helpful before watching the film, if one is not well-acquainted with the author and his fiction. On my own, of the great French literary work, I've read through only the first volume, Swann's Way.)

Time subjectively lived and regained, upon which Proust's narrator applies introspective analysis, is the controlling theme. In the private library of his friends, waiting for an intermission that will allow him to join others listening to Charlie Morel (Vincent Perez) performing on violin, Proust - who had become dejected following his reading Goncourt's journals, disillusioned with his artistic aspirations ("vanity and falsehoods of literature") - has an epiphany.

"That day, the signs of which lessened my discouragement and restored my faith in writing seemed to multiply around me. If memory, thanks to the act of forgetting, offers no bridge from itself to the present, it allows us to breathe a new air. New, because we've breathed it before. Poets tried vainly to situate this air in paradise, but the true paradises are those we have lost. This meant that the fear of my own death stopped as soon as I recalled the taste of the madeleine."

Creating art out of the shadows of his mind, taking advantage of involuntary, "privileged" associations, stimulated unconsciously by the presence of objects or circumstances, reconnecting without transforming the initial experience (of which he could not appreciate its significance at the time), permitted moments of psychological (perhaps spiritual) ascendancy (rediscovery in the immediate its meaning and truth) during which he felt he existed in both the past and present simultaneously - "a transcendental reality independent of time" (Benét).

However, self-conscious efforts to recall the distant past distort the original impression through the filter of one's changed character, just as the actual air drawn through the nostrils is warmed and moistened before it reaches the lungs as breath.

In his fiction Proust omitted certain essential aspects of himself from his narrator, projecting his homosexuality onto Le Baron du Charlus (John Malkovich), for one, as well as his Jewishness and hypochondria onto other characters. As the narrator successfully rises through the ranks of Parisian aristocracy, he comes to recognize kaleidoscopic patterns of people's emotions and behaviors, their snobbery and hypocrisy. His youthful ideals and belief in the permanence of absolute values, especially love, eventually appear as merely illusory, relative to circumstances.

Following her marriages to Charles Swann and later to her late husband's rival de Forcheville, Odette de Crécy (Catherine Deneuve), mother of Gilberte (Emmanuelle Béart), becomes the duc de Guermantes's mistress and representative of Proust's view of love (exciting in its anticipation) as boringly irksome (monotony of monogamy) after its consummation, only to be aroused again through jealousy. Similarly, says the narrator: "You gradually grow indifferent to death."

A Guermantes and close companion of the narrator, the Marquis Robert de Saint-Loup (Pascal Greggory) falls in love with Rachel, a prostitute, to the distaste of his relations before he marries Gilberte; later he acknowledges his homosexuality and dies during the First World War. First du Charlus's male lover and then Saint-Loup's, Morel the violinist, who during the war had to hide out as a draft dodger, afterward administers moral judgments.

Characters in their post-Edwardian fashions expel bons mots in delicious or delicate conversations throughout the crowded chambers of ornately decorated palaces. A close or distant relation depends upon our interest in him or her. To avoid speaking nonsense, du Charlus instructs the young Marcel, refrain from emotional exclamations and don't answer before comprehending the reply.

The music that on first hearing sounded monotonous returns with hidden, recurring realities, as does great literature upon rereading and closer inspection, revealing previously obscured analogies and correspondences, for example the parallelism to be found in the novels of Thomas Hardy, in particular Jude the Obscure and The Well-Beloved. From an angel, given the opportunity to review his life as he's about to expire, the sculptor Salvini instead chose to gaze upon his final work, for to re-examine his life in its entirety, he realized, would require an eternity.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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