Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

The Sweet Cheat: Time Regained

105 The Sweet Cheat Time Regained [A few years ago], I refused to direct Remembrance of Things Past. I wrote to the woman producer [Nicole Stéphane] that no real filmmaker would allow himself to squeeze the madeleine as though it were a lemon and in my opinion only a film butcher would have the nerve to put Proust through the mincer. A few weeks later she obtained the agreement of the Verdurin salon, that is to say, René Clement. Come to think of it, is Proust burning in [the book-burning fires of my film] Fahrenheit ∂∑∞? No, but this omission will soon be corrected. —François Truffaut, ‘‘The Journal of Fahrenheit ∂∑∞ ’’ (∞Ω∏∏) I read Remembrance of Things Past all the way through more than thirty-five years ago, shortly before Truffaut registered his scorn about the very notion of a film version (Stéphane eventually got the film made in 1984—Volker Schlöndorff’s dispensable Swann in Love). Yet I still remember my encounter with Proust as sharply as if I’d been visiting a foreign country for the first time. It was a complex engagement that made me wiser, because, as Alain de Botton recently demonstrated in How Proust Can Change Your Life, Remembrance of Things Past is the ultimate self-help book, bristling with useful advice and information. It also made me more foolish, because Proust’s neurotic fixations about falling in love and its attendant agonies were so convincing that I probably exaggerated my own when I fell in love for the first time soon afterward. I read the novel during an extended college break, averaging about a hundred pages a day, with Edmund Wilson’s wonderful Proust chapter in Axel’s Castle as my principal guide. Not stretching my reading of the novel over several months undoubtedly enhanced the experience, because Proust’s strategically plotted surprises about his characters, in which people often turn out to be much different from what we suppose, are bound to be less dramatic if we have enough time to forget our first impressions. In total, I must have spent the equivalent of two days reading. Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained—a brilliant and original 165-minute adaptation playing this week at the Music Box—sensibly tries to limit itself to the last of the novel’s seven sections, Le temps retrouvé, referring back to material in previous parts only when necessary. Yet anyone who approaches Time Regained thinking it might capture the essence 106 ESSENTIAL CINEMA of the greatest novel of the twentieth century in roughly one-seventeenth the time it took me to read it is indulging in an orgy of self-deception. I couldn’t recommend the film to anybody in search of such a digest or as any sort of replacement for the original. For starters, most of the surprises about characters are reduced to footnotes rather than incorporated into the main text. For better and for worse, Ruiz’s version is closer to a game than an adventure—not so much a lesson about life as an elaborate piece of playfulness. Ruiz, I should add, is a friend, and one thing that’s made me skeptical about his project from the outset—it became an obsession of his years ago—is that compromises of various kinds were virtually inscribed in its conception. The desire to make a star-studded blockbuster has always seemed a bit contrary to his nature and his talent for throwaway invention. Only last month he admitted to me that he had had to cut about forty-five minutes prior to the film’s 1999 Cannes premiere—two-thirds of which he accepted without qualm, one-third of which he regretted because it made the film more difficult to follow (he especially regretted the loss of some material relating to the character of Morel). He originally hoped to cast, among others, Michel Piccoli as Charlus and Bernadette Lafont as Fran- çoise, and when at one stage executives tried to impose Gérard Depardieu as Charlus—blockbuster thinking with a vengeance—he told me that under such conditions he’d rather not make the movie at all. Back in the 60s, my own ideal casting for Charlus was Peter Sellers, who’d recently starred in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, and despite the resourcefulness of John Malkovich in the part, dubbed on occasion by someone else, I miss the comic extravagance of Proust’s character as well as the comic violence sometimes...