There are oddball titles like the 1978 The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Jean Reno's screen debut). There was a 1985 production of Treasure Island with Martin Landau. There was Three Lives and Only One Death, which, featuring as it did one of Marcello Mastroianni's last starring roles, became the first Ruiz film to gain real American distribution. That led to 1997's Genealogies of a Crime with Catherine Deneuve, and then to the underrated thriller Shattered Image with Anne Parillaud and Stephen Baldwin. Shattered's plot bore a spooky resemblance to the current Passion of Mind.
Ruiz is back with a hugely ambitious project--an adaptation of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time), which is considered by many to be the greatest 20th-century novel--3,000 pages, seven books, originally published in 15 volumes. The credits claim it is based only on Time Regained, the last part of this massive autobiographical work, but my Proust consultants, and Ruiz himself, acknowledge that there are elements from the other books...though with Proust it can be hard to tell.
The action--if indeed the word "action" can be invoked anywhere in a review of Time Regained--begins with Proust on his deathbed. It would be simple to say that the rest of the film is told in flashbacks, but Ruiz takes an approach not nearly so linear. The film intermingles memories of the protagonist's childhood with scenes from his adult life, ranging from roughly 1880 through World War I and on into the early '20s. (The author died in 1922.)
Ruiz has a strong sense of mood and has always played with narrative convention in fascinating ways--both of which may make him sound as though he were the perfect director for this daunting project. Yet he may actually be too perfect: The final product might have benefited from more tension between adapter and adaptee. Prose fiction, by its nature, can afford to stretch out, to luxuriate, in a way that cinema, both by its nature and that of the human bladder, can't.
This is not to suggest that Michael Bay (Armageddon) or Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon) would have been more appropriate: He's gay...he's asthmatic...and he's out for revenge! When the law is not enough, call Marcel Proust! "Arrêt-vous btards! Drop those weapons or I'll wheeze at you and then deftly portray your gaucherie for all time in my immortal autobiography! Allez-y! Faites mon jour!" But Ruiz's approach, flowing in and out of various settings and decades, introducing numerous characters in a series of barely distinguishable party scenes, may only emphasize the most difficult aspects of his source material.
For the first third or so--the film runs two hours and 40 minutes--Ruiz's dazzling technique holds our interest. There are mirror shots, multiple exposures, strange framings, levitations, and metamorphoses. At one point, a character repeats the same entrance twice within the same shot. (There must be a disturbance in the Matrix!) He uses every wonderful trick that Alain Resnais employed in Last Year at Marienbad and Providence--and then some. Every once in a while, he throws us off balance in a novel way: He'll be moving the camera, but the shift in perspective between foreground and background won't appear quite right; at first it seems as though he's using the track-zoom technique employed by Hitchcock in Vertigo and Marnie; then you realize that he literally has furniture and actors standing on dollies that are being moved at speeds that violate our visual expectations.
But even this totally fitting, stylistic razzle-dazzle and the sumptuous production design and cinematography begin to wear thin after a while. While Ruiz says that viewers need not already have read Proust--and that this could even be preferable when seeing the film--he may be fooling himself. Without at least a cursory knowledge of the milieu and the characters, Time Regained is largely baffling, made even more so by the constant time shifts. Too many characters, introduced too quickly, refer to each other too casually. Wait! Which aristocrat is John Malkovich (made up to look weirdly like Walter Huston): Saint-Loup or Charlus? How old is he? Is Catherine Deneuve playing Marcel's mother or a contemporary? Is Oriane a Guermantes or a Saint-Loup or both? What is the significance of which family she belongs to? What is the significance of one of the characters losing track of these crucial distinctions? How are we supposed to know? Has the war ended yet?
So many elements of Ruiz's work are lovely that this utter confusion as to what's happening...and when...and why we should care...is a shame. Proust buffs will doubtless not be bothered; and, among the rest of us, the most alert moviegoers may find enough to hold their interest. But for many--most of whom, sadly, will be coming to Ruiz for the first time--the film's demands may be too perplexing.
