My Notes on Time Regained (the film)

It is certainly one of the most exquisite experiences on earth having finished reading In Search of Lost Time...

Raoul Ruiz is famous for his obsession with and his skill in representation of “remembrance of things past”, or “stream of consciousness” with his hypnotic, dreamlike cinematic images, and I started watching Time Regained with such expectation.

To say it is an adaptation of Proust’s literary work, I’d rather put it as a work inspired by it. There are certain Raoul Ruiz's own input and invention in it.

I appreciate the film’s being experimental in exhausting many kinds of film languages to capture the idea of “finding time again”, or “travelling through time”, its brilliant use of mise-en-scene (especially in those scenes where there is Marcel alone), slowly and rhythmically unfolding a deep melanchly in certain scenes, the beautifully exggerated lighting and high contrast cinematography that re-creates a dreamlike ambience, and its first-person narrative in disguise of a third-person narrative (or third-person in disguise of first-person) - because Marcel, the narrator, is always there - exactly corresponding to that of the Book’s.

But, as one can expect, much of the book's poetic beauty, sadness, and sense of disillusion is lost.

The major problem being it is an adaptation of only the last volume, with a vain attempt to (sometimes) explain (certain) things in brief. It is not feasible at all to depict the last volume alone, because it's true beauty could only be realized after you have experienced all the preceding volumes. BUT it would be another issue, if one aims more at visualizing certain moments than unfolding a story, which, sadly, does not seem to be what RR is doing.

I believe this film is intended only for those who have read the book – I have difficulty imagining people who never read the book being able to make sense out of this film, let alone grasping the significance of every scene and every single line being delivered. (Yet on the other hand, for those who have read the book, all these would seem too simplified, shallow, and out of place!)

This enclosed and no-so-care-to-explain-everything approach reminds me a little bit of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Go Master (《吳清源》). BUT the problem with Time Regained is exactly in the parts when it tries to explain (one and one's relationship, or what had happened in the previous volumes)! For example, the scene in which Marcel, as a child, meets the “lady in pink” in his uncle's place without yet realizing her to be the Odette who later plays a very important role in his life, was a key moment in the book, key only when it is recalled, and key being it brings Marcel to the realization that "the significance of an experience is not always immediately revealed"; but the scene only functions as a flashback (not to mention it is totally misleading: as if Odette knows Marcel being the little boy - she never does). Another scene being Marcel’s confrontation with Albertine which is awkward and never for one second succeeds in depicting the power struggle and the bizarre love-torture relationship between them. These two scenes may well left unshot!

Nonetheless, as a work inspired by the original work, it was a pleasure to re-experience some of the poetic moments in moving images – only those with Marcel alone.

Because Marcel is very Marcel (take a look at the screen captures below).

Whereas the rest of the cast, except Catherine Deneuve as Odette carrying her mysterious charm, is a little bit of a disaster: The gentle and caring Saint-Loup is too disappointingly ugly; Emmanuelle Beart is sensual and enchanting as always, but she is being too much herself than Gilberte and her acting is too modern for the role. Morel is way too ordinary-looking to be the homme fatale of the whole work. John Malkovich gave a fair performance as Charlus but he is still not the charming, elegant and at once sarcastic and loving Baron to me…And see how Albertine, the elusive little kitten, the sophisticated, sad, and mischievous kitten, and one who attracts and is attacted to women, is turned into a vulgar witch (should I be glad that she, Chiara Mastroianni, being really Deneuve's daughter, was not casted as Gilberte?)...

How cute that soaked-with-tear Marcel is...