This sounds like a sure-fire prescription for a terrible movie: base it on Proust's "Remembrance of Things
Past," a 5,000+ word opus that takes place in the mind and reminiscences of the author. To make it worse, in real life Proust didn't do much of anything except flit around a demimonde society that
occupied itself with pleasure and little else. He wasn't even a dilettante: he watched them! Proust's genius lies in his extensive, subtle observations on the nature of his perceptions of life –
exactly opposite of the screen's demanding appetite for explication and demonstration.
Luckily, Chilean director Raoul Ruiz wasn't scared away.
His "Time Regained" is an exquisitely filmed, deftly handled marathon anchored by Marcello Mazzarella's
remarkable performance as Proust: watchful, observing, always communicating an air of sharp observation despite spending most of his time listening and reacting instead of taking action. Mazzarella (a dead ringer for the author) cultivates an air of intelligent curiosity and seeking in his posture and movements, giving the audience a stable character to focus on as the activity whirls around.
And whirl, it does. True to the nature of Proust, the film flips back and forth between past and present, two different actors playing the same person (both as they are and as they are
remembered by Proust), and with our visual perceptions. We are introduced to the main cast as a dying Proust, ensconced in the famous cork-lined room, rifles through a box of old photographs.
This rather clumsy introduction into the large cast is perhaps the only practical way to introduce everyone in a film that doesn't lend itself to simplistic mapping out.
Yet watch – right away we're
plunged into a party scene where the courtesan Odette (Catherine Deneuve)
enters, then the scene melts away into Proust's youth, to glide back again into the party with Odette's entrance seen from a different point of view. This dizzying movement from a past scene to the author's youth back to a different view of the past demonstrates the theme of the novel and the movie. All that happens has happened before, filtered and created both by Proust's memory and his act of remaking it into his novel. It sounds bizarre and stilted but works so elegantly that there's not a moment of disorientation. Watching this visual sleight of hand makes you at once aware you're watching something artificial, yet a willing participant in the inner workings of someone's mind. Brief scenes like Albertine (Chiara Mastroianni) telling Proust she kissed a girl would be annoying in another movie, because this brief sequence exists solely on its own without obvious connection to the rest of the film, yet it makes sense in the context of
this film: an examination of the nature of memory and "regaining time" by the act of remembering.
We are treated to various scenes, some mild (Odette at the party) and some
forceful (the Baron, near death, bows merely to delight an enemy). Proust observed a dying way of life, crushed out of existence by WWI. This is neatly demonstrated in a lean sequence towards the
end of the film showing a clumsy American expat loudly social climbing – times have changed. Yet Proust hasn't. He remains ageless in the film, as the others around him have aged. He
meets Gilberte, unrecognizable as an old lady, yet he remembers her in her luminous
youth, illustrated as the old woman suddenly becomes Beart without need of explanation. It's an elegant way of translating memory's timelessness against reality's constant push forward.
The
hedonistic excesses of this class are embodied by the Baron, played by John Malkovich
with a perfect French accent that sounds bizarre with his flat American tones. And boy, does he live it up. Shackles and rent boys and whips, oh my! The funniest scene in the film involves Proust's efforts to spy on the Baron's sick pleasures. Proust urgently shuffles back and forth with various chairs, resembling Charlie Chaplin, until he finally reaches the window for a peek. Therein is another amusing part of this film: it lays bare Proust's almost pathological zeal for observation. Mazzarella plays Proust with a profound innocence, in that there's nothing sleazy about him pulling a peeping tom on far more depraved Baron.
Good work by Chiara (Deneuve's daughter) emanating a robust warm sensuality in her brief sequence and the ethereal Emmanuel Beart as Gilberte. Deneuve is again superb as Odette, an
unconventional woman who remains Proust's fast friend for life. She pulls off a mixture of dissoluteness and dignity, gowned to perfection, scandalous, gossiped about and not giving a damn. Yes,
that's hottie Vincent Perez as Morel, a pompous pianist.
Costume work
is excellent and production
is quite good. Mobile camera work adds greatly to the scene, particularly when one row of listeners slides to the right as the others slide to the left with the camera circling about, all coming to rest as the music ends. A magician's trick of a movie, "Time Regained" is a finely crafted, very well put together film that yields many dazzling moments in its quiet, complicated way.
Will be a good rental. |
