Time regained

I bought Le temps retrouvé (1999) a few months ago, but I haven't watched it until now. To begin with, I was quite worried about how a film based on Proust's Time Regained might turn out. It's not the kind of book in which A happens, then B, which leads up to C, ending with climax D. Proust wrote about memory, about self-deception, and how these two intertwine. How we gain a perspective on the way we deceive ourselves, and how this changes how we remember things. His book evolves around the protagonist's changing understanding of himself and of other people, but these changes are not described by means of linear storytelling. Rather, the book unravels a world of details, characters (hundreds of them!), smells, associations - and it is among this myriad of impressions that the reader gets a glimpse of the protagonist. This is not Hollywood material, to be sure.

I knew next to nothing about Raoul Ruiz, who directed the film. I've heard he's often considered a surrealist, but what that means nowadays, I'm not really sure. The film keeps the "loose" (from one perspective) associative style of the books. Marcel Proust remembers things on his deathbed, and the film consists of a weave of memories, knit together by small transitions in the images. A door leads to a new landscape, a different scenery evolves in a mirror, etc. I guess that might cover the "surrealist" part, and, for me, it was the part of the film that I was less impressed by. The transitions did work, sometimes, but many times I got a sense of construction (something I never thought about when reading Proust).

Some of the scenes were absolutely stunning. In one scene, Saint-Loup (the protagonist's close friend) and Marcel are dining. Saint-Loup chows down his food and brags about the virtues of the French army. We watch him eating and bragging for several minutes, and the scene is painful and funny at the same time. "God, that was good meat!" In other scenes, the protagonist is simply walking around; at parties, numbly, seemlingly slightly amused, listening the créme de la créme's chit-chat about relatives and .... more relatives.

In Proust's book, we get a quite clear picture about the protagonist. It is his own image of himself that is put in question by his confrontations with his memories and with other characters. In the film, the protagonist is a much hazier character. Given the book's sense of subjectivity expressed by a narrative from the protagonist's - however deceitful - point of view, subjectivity is, in the film, transformed into the gaze of the protagonist; the things he focuses upon, the things he does not see. But I guess this is something about which I could say a lot more were I to watch the film again - and I really think I will.

It was also interesting to see that the film stayed true to the book in the sense that the multitude of characters causes confusion for the reader/viewer. The book and the film are swarming with people, but the means of evoking a sense of crowdiness (in mind & physical space) were, of course, quite different.