04 Dec Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1999)

Recognition, Invention, Counter-regret

This is one of the most ambitious film projects I have seen, risky and successful. It is not successful Proust in my opinion, something different but similar.

Proust used the magic of words to weave a life out of remembered fragments. That magic depends on the ability of the written word to generate images in our minds — Proust found the ability to create these in such a way that they converge with recalled images (of ours, though the focus is purportedly his). This is a particular kind of self-generating self-referential art. No life should be without it. No literary life can.

Film differs from literature of course, but most profoundly in this context. Film is already an image. Film images can converge with ones in our memories, but they are more anchored. And since they are generated for us, we have to follow rather than lead.

Ruiz comes to this from a fabulist perspective, meaning he can make cinematic images less specific, more vague. The solution works: we are presented with a blizzard of characters, scant narrative footing and lots of folding: time folding, image folding, observer overlap. This way, the images we are given are softer and more pliable than usual and allow for something like the consciousness-skipping of Proust. But it is not the same: we watch someone creating a remembered life, but don’t really participate in the intimate and shared way of the books.

And instead of a book about a life, we have a film about a book about a life. That difference is significant in some ways: when we have Gilberte, we just can’t help but fall in love with her a little ourselves. When the concert is fully underway, we see Marcel seeing something. The room shifts, and we know some manifold epiphany is underway, but don’t ‘see’ it ourselves. We participate in a cinematic experience, not a life. That life partially unfolds for us in images later, but we don’t relive it.

All of this is cast in a visual meditation. ‘In the Mood for Love’ works some of this territory, as does ’The Thin Red Line.’ This differs in the inherent voyeurism and the magical reality created by one of the on-screen characters, and the striking music generated by another.

Opening shots are promises. The titles are accompanied by a familiar vision of water over rocks. But it shifts downstream and cants before we know it, and then moves back upstream, telling us the whole idea right there. Then we have a remarkable bedroom scene that by itself is one of the strongest moments in film — the dictation comes close to the genuine Proust effect, and the surreal movement of furniture against the camera are truly hypnotising.

There’s one device that is used subtly, one that you would expect is pretentiously inflated. But it isn’t. This is the ‘camera’ that Ruiz gives Marcel: as a boy a lantern that freezes, himself frozen twice, certain ads, certain photos… several other images. Completely understated, and thus more powerful.

Posted in 2002

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB