Time Regained

To tell the truth, I never got more than a hundred pages into Proust, so I am not one to judge the adequacy of Raoul Ruiz’s adaptation of the final volume. (Nor have I seen any of his other films.) Certainly it would help to have the backstory to keep the characters straight, but the merit of the film is that it stands on its own, with its visualization of time transformed from a line into a Moebius strip -- twisting, turning, doubling back on itself. Ignorance may even be a help in staying with it -- I may not know Odette but I sure recognize Catherine Deneuve; I may not know Gilberte but am quite familiar with Emmanuelle Beart. And John Malkovich as Baron Charlus puts me on home terrain. This is a movie to go with the flow, rather than try to follow. It put me in mind of The Russian Ark, for its ceaseless, searching round of upper class affairs, but I found it much easier to stay with than that long single shot set in the Hermitage. Here I was struck by the surrealism of tracking shots, where not just the camera moved but the objects themselves, in an effective visual metaphor for the flux of time and memory. The presence (and absence) of World War I reverberated with two of my absolutely favorite films, Jules and Jim and The Grand Illusion. So all in all, I had no problem sitting through 162 minutes of elusive and allusive beauty. (1999, dvd, n.) *7*