It may seem like folly to try and adapt Proust’s masterpiece for the screen but Raoul Ruiz has a brave stab at it. He has assembled an impressive ensemble cast including Catherine Deneuve as Odette, Emmanuelle Beart as Gilberte, Vincent Perez as Morel and lastly John Malkovich, as the effeminate Baron de Charlus. It is Marcello Mazzarella who shines as Proust himself, a fussy social butterfly whose idyll of parties, beaches and concerts is rudely interrupted by illness. Proust himself eventually became a recluse, who slept by day and wrote by night, despairing at the endless round of engagements expected of a man in his social position. Marcello Mazzarella acurately captures the essence of a man trapped by ennui, illness and envious of the one true achiever in the film, composer Morel (an admirably restrained Perez.)

Deneuve has little to do but has one remarkable scene. The writer as a young boy remembers a visit for tea. Speaking of the men she has known she claims "artists and men of exception" are the only ones worth bothering about. Her beauty which is still admired and described - "ravishing" - has given her the power to be cruel with her lovers. Her reputation for easy virtue does not prevent her building an impressive list of conquests. Her daughter Gilbert, a change of tone for Beart, entices the author in childhood and he remembers a particular gesture she made toward him as "obscene" – a charge she later denies, claiming frivolity and a sense of play. Ruiz cleverly shows us the scene in flashback and we have to side with the author and his remembrance as the miserly and closed up Gilberte insists on her take of events. Her spell is lost for the author. Another lover of the author Albertine (Chara Mastroianni) appears as a ghost to give life to the utterance that a former love is like a life lived and lost and if they re-appear in your life, they appear as a death. Pascal Gregory is especially fine as the uptight bisexual St Loup, who sponsors the young Morel on his way up but finds himself abandoned after his success.

Ruiz uses his every drop of ingenuity to convey the complicated time structure and the constant leaps back and forth but even at the two and a bit hours running length it still feels compressed. Much of the sequences work but one dream scene is awkward. Proust walking through a ruin with his characters dotted around was a Felliniesque moment too far. But such notes are rare in this fine film and the finale at the beach is superb. We rejoice in the seascape as much as the young boy running and the old man walking towards him. The film captures what has made Proust endure and leaves you hungry to return to the book, which is commendable.

simon skinner

Time Regained: An Artificial Eye Release.

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