Time Regained
dir. Raul Ruiz
Kino International

You’ve wasted the first 40 years of your life. Despite your brains, you never worked at achieving a career. Instead, you drifted from party to party, from beach to casino, squandering the money you inherited from your father. Your most serious romantic love was your obsession with a woman who never loved you and eventually deserted you. And despite your deep respect for Big Writing, you’ve hardly written anything. After falling ill, you ask yourself how you could have wasted so much time.

Clearly, you must be Marcel, a Parisian living in 1915. Your story is told in Marcel Proust’s semi-autobiographical novel “In Search of Lost Time.” And the movie version of your life is Time Regained, an adaptation of the final volume of the novel by director Raul Ruiz. In the movie, which faithfully tracks the novel, Marcel recalls how he wasted himself and, by carefully crafting his remembrance of things past, creates the masterful story of the eventually penitent loafer who makes use of his talents and redeems himself.

Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella) arrives in Paris after having lived out of town for a few years, and meets three main figures from his past. On the way to a party, Marcel meets the creepy Baron de Charlus (John Malkovich). Marcel is shocked to see this old man, now a slight shadow of the sadomasochist and cultural snob he once had been. Memories from Marcel’s youth flood back, and in an extended flashback scene, we visit Marcel’s past.

After a quick jump, the film returns to the party where Marcel finds the princesses and lieutenants he had once so slavishly courted. They have grown old and pathetic, dwindling souls in the equivalent of a failing social club. Marcel meets Odette (Catherine Deneuve), a seductress full of her own faded glamour, and Deneuve skillfully personifies the character more through gesture than word. As Odette, she does more than approach prospective lovers; she somehow falls into the orbit of these married men. You can almost see a physical hesitation, a jerk, between when she glides aimlessly through a party and when she, surrenderingly, swoops toward an aristocrat with the motion of a satellite falling into a new orbit, pulled by the gravity of celebrity. Deneuve’s performance is one example of how Ruiz coaxes his actors to use stylized movements and glances to distill the essence of their characters.

Earning the affection of both the Baron and Odette is Morel (Vincent Perez), a violinist, a prostitute and a coward. While Odette and the Baron earn hundreds of pages of description in Proust’s novel, Morel gains prominence in Ruiz’s film translation. Morel climbs through society, playing different characters’ jealousies off each other. His climb up the greasy pole helps to drive Marcel to his epiphany about how he can redeem himself through creating the story of this dying society on the written page.

Reduced to simple summary, the film might sound like a motion-picture morality tale, served up as a solemn “Masterpiece Theater” rendering of a Modern Classic. The movie, however, veers away from such a lethal fate, thanks to Ruiz’s clever, quirky direction. Ruiz uses several visual tricks, including moving the standing Marcel on a mechanical dolly through crowds, to destabilize the filmed images. Many tricks, from jump cuts to a clever use of fades and body-doubles, prevent the film from becoming too confident in its authenticity, while suggesting the Impressionism popular in artwork in Marcel’s day and also drawing from Ruiz’s earlier experiments in narrative upset in movies such as Genealogies of a Crime.

Time Regained skillfully appeals to the viewer who has never read Proust as well as to the madeleine-tasting, die-hard Proustians. Ruiz has taken the author’s central lesson to heart, which is that our purpose on Earth is to create things, and that we should not delay creating a work of art out of fear that it will fall short of our aspiration. Three other directors have translated Proust’s masterwork to the silver screen, but Ruiz’s attempt is distinctly his own, and, despite flaws such as trying to compress too much plot from the seven volume book into three hours, we’re all the richer for it.

— Sean O'Neill (NewsFromDC@cs.com)