Time Regained
(Le Temps Retrouvé)

at The Phoenix until February 10th 2000

Like the novel on which it is based, Time Regained is long and complicated, and depicts a dual vision of reality versus fiction through the unstable filter of the dying artist's mind. Proust's sprawling masterpiece is notoriously hard to film, and this brave attempt by Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz seems to take the right approach by starting from the final volume and working back.
The dying writer (Marcello Mazzarella) looks back through his collection of photographs, and as he does so the voices of the people he knew echo back to him, his mind jumping between memories of childhood and adulthood; between real events and fictional creations. Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart and John Malkovitch (his usual chilly self) play some of the people who have crossed his path in one way or another. Although more of an observer than a participant, Proust is of implicit importance to the action, for it is his vision and his memory that structures the story and our subsequent perception of the characters. Social and literary life merge, and through his created characters Proust remembers his family, his lovers and the innocence of childhood.
Ruiz captures the sense of dreamy timelessness of the story by blending the baroque with the surreal. Life is seen a kind of grotesque masquerade in which the players perform like stilted marionettes, united only by a common desire to hide the truth that lurks behind their made-up appearances. Scenery comes and goes, appears larger than life, or suddenly transmutes into something else. Scenes are disjointed and fade into another with the fluidity of a dream. Meanwhile characters wear exaggerated costume and make-up, and often metamorphose before our eyes from youth into haggard old age, the progression from innocence to embittered maturity engraved on their wrinkled faces. An insane, multi-layered, and immeasurably superficial social world is thus revealed, made even ghastlier by the terrible background of the First World War against which it is played out.
Time Regained is a very clever film, both in ideas and effects, which, if you can bear the gruelling two and a half hour session, is well worth seeing. Despite the tenuousness of the subject, it is engaging throughout, and will leave you perhaps with the conclusion of Proust - that the only real truth is to be found in literature.

Jane Labous
02/02/2000