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Swann in Love For his next assignment, Schlöndorff signed onto a project that had previously daunted such film artists as Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey—an adaptation from Marcel Proust’s multivolume novel Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu). The German filmmaker’s Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann), shot in France in the summer of 1983, takes a single volume from Proust and spins it out into a feature-length film that only alludes to the larger work as a whole. As narrative, Swann in Love is a wisp of a story. It is about Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons), an upper-middle-class dandy who has social access to the late-nineteenth-century French aristocracy but who sacrifices his social standing by becoming obsessively infatuated with a capricious demimonde, Odette de Crécy (Ornella Muti). Schlöndorff’s film describes how Swann pursues the only intermittently responsive Odette, only to see desire evaporate as soon as its realization becomes possible. The movie ends with Swann as an old man, reflecting on a life that he has all but thrown away on an evanescent flirtation. Critical reception of Swann in Love was not particularly warm. Both popular reviewers and literary scholars found the film a rather flat adaptation of only a portion of Marcel Proust’s sprawling Remembrance of Things Past, and few film critics have argued that the film successfully stands alone as a work of film art. Audience reception was comparable. Although the film broke opening week house records in its New York premiere at the Paris theater in fall of 1984, its box office grosses declined precipitously in subsequent weeks, indicating mediocre word of mouth (Coursodon 22–23). Subsequent scholarship has been no more positive. Perhaps the most stinging academic attack on the film has been by Phil Powrie, who argues skillfully that the film is a mere transformation of a work of literature into a commercial property, designed to turn Proust into a cultural commodity for international bourgeois audiences. Schlöndorff’s involvement in the project was to be merely 18 206 a way to legitimatize large-scale monetary investment. Similarly, the presence of international stars like Irons and Alain Delon becomes part of an industrial package that gets wrapped up with lavish sets and costumes and pretty photography by renowned Swedish cameraman Sven Nykvist. For Powrie, Swann in Love’s few social concerns are superficial and ultimately hypocritical. He labels the film “static, vacuous, dehistoricized spectacle” (33). We would like to propose a qualified defense of Swann in Love. It is not that Powrie is totally wrong: Swann in Love was certainly marketed as a cultural commodity, and Schlöndorff’s prestigious reputation as an adapter of “impossible ” literature was no doubt a comfort to investors. There is no question that, had its script been proposed without the context of Proust’s literary classic, the film might never have been made. But we would also assert that the whole issue of adaptation has so clouded the reception of Swann in Love that a number of its particular subtleties have gone unnoticed. Schlöndorff has constructed Swann in Love around three central, interrelated metaphors whose sources may be less in Proust than in Schlöndorff’s approach to cinematic narrative and audiovisual expression. These metaphors involve the movie’s twenty-fourhour structure, its dominant images and sounds, and the symbolic nature of its sexuality. Seen in the light of these metaphors, Swann in Love takes on a limpidity , coherence, and cinema-specificity that critics have ignored. Schlöndorff has transformed Proust into something different—not necessarily something as important or as rich as its literary antecedent but neither something to be immediately dismissed. Metaphor One—The Day and the Lifetime In accepting the Swann in Love assignment from producer Nicole Stéphane, Schlöndorff retained a structure that had been devised for the film when Peter Brook was at the helm of the project: the condensation of the movie’s main action to a single day, with a filling in of necessary material through flashbacks and an epilogue. Some critics, such as Anne Tarqui, have seen this as a major betrayal of Proust. Tarqui argues that “Proustian writing consists exactly of minimizing the singular to emphasize the habitual, the repetitive. The Proustian formula is not ‘once upon a time’ but ‘often.’” The result, the argument goes, is that the telescoping of sequences flattens the interior life of the characters and the...

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