Il tempo ritrovato

If you're looking for a movie that faithfully reduces In Search of Lost Time to 2 hours or so, this isn't it. But then, that's impossible, so you will be frustrated in your search.

What this is is a problematic movie.

If you don't know Proust's 4000 page novel, In Search of Lost Time, I suspect a lot of this movie won't make sense to you. If you do know it, on the other hand, you might be upset that X does not look like Proust's character A, that Y scene was left out, etc.

So, the best way to enjoy this movie - and there is a lot in it to enjoy - is to know Proust's novel well enough so that you can make sense of the movie, but then to forget about it and treat this as a movie that is not trying to film Proust's novel.

I could go on about the way the film jumps from scene to scene based on recollections of the narrator. One might say that that's Proustian, but Proust does not in fact jump from one short scene to the next. So I'll leave that aside.

What this is, for me - and I have seen the movie several times - is a remarkable collection of performances by some of France's greatest actors and actresses - and John Malkovich. The performances by Catherine Deneuve (as Odette; no, she does not look at all like I had imagined Odette from the novel, but she is radiant in this movie), Emmanuelle Béart (as Gilberte Swann; ditto), John Malkovich (Charlus; ditto in spades; he does not look at all like Proust describes Charlus, but he creates a remarkably moving and coherent character), Vincent Perez (Morel; he may look like Proust's Morel, but he gives him more depth), and Marie-France Pisier (Mme Verdurin) are all absolutely first rate, beautiful to watch. They make the film for me. Other characters important in Proust are either reduced to very small roles (the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes, the Prince and Princess de G) or vanish altogether (Swann, Marcel's father). But watching the above great actors and actresses give great performances is, for me, the great value of this movie.

If you want Proust, you'll just have to read it.

But if you want to see some of France's greatest actors and actresses at their best, you could do a lot worse than this movie.

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!"

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.

who seem to know their Proust, their film, or both. That said, I found the film excellent, and the fellow who said it was about boring people leading boring lives, well! How boring can it be when you hear the sounds of ordinance whilst turning out in evening clothes trying to keep a sense of civilisation? Although it might seem disjointed, I am given to understand that Proust's writing was hardly linear, so a motion picture presenting his point of view must perforce be somewhat tangled.

TIME REGAINED, which I had the pleasure of seeing on big screen at the Detroit Institute of Arts, is truly beautiful. One gives not a sou whether it looks "expensive" as another (otherwise thoughtful) commentator says.

Speaking of my fellow reviewers, I just got off the Comments list for 28 DAYS LATER. It is striking how seeming intelligent and articulate the people are who went out of their way to see a French film, trusting in sub-titles, as opposed to those who saw another foreign product because it was going to be scary or a "zombie" movie. One can learn from the TIME REGAINED lot, the same as the motion picture.

I am not that well-read. Maybe when I finish reading that Zola novel I have been working on for over ten years, Proust will be next!

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.