Are you expected to convey the rich, dense textual material of Proust's writing with gurning facial expressions?Īside from that, the film writer and Guardian obituarist Ronald Bergan has written about his participation in a massive, open-ended video project, aimed at encompassing the whole book, called Le Baiser De La Matrice by Veronique Aubouy, in which thousands of different people will each read a single page of Proust's novel to the camera in a location of their own choosing. Mischa Lesca, playing the young narrator Marcel, has a stilted, pop-eyed look – although his difficulties are those of any actor in this role. His mistress-turned-wife Odette vanishes from the story entirely. The first and most famous volume, Swann's Way, is truncated almost to nothing, Swann himself – the aesthete and collector whose life and obsessive love make such an impression on Marcel, and whose Judaism is at the centre of Proust's observations on antisemitism and the Dreyfus affair – is reduced to a cameo. The whole thing is reduced to two feature-length episodes it whizzes past like a breezy daytime soap. Dirk Bogarde, who had been approached by both Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey to act in their various doomed Proust projects, wrote that audiences – the non-Proustian laity – might be perplexed in any event: "Will they know who is who? Or what is what?" It's a fair question.Īs things stand, the only attempt at a complete, conventional dramatic adaptation is the somewhat odd 2011 version for French television, written for the screen and directed by Nina Companeez. Doing one volume is a pint in a quart pot. So should a film-maker try to encompass the whole, gigantic thing? Or is that like Monty Python's Summarise Proust competition? Should the director, conversely, stick to one single volume? Or is there something unsatisfying and baffling about that, in that it detaches characters from the larger context, making them even more difficult to keep track of? Trying the whole thing is putting a quart in a pint pot. Nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the vision that the cinematograph presents." Although, rereading that passage, it strikes me now that it is not a clear-cut dismissal of the cinema as art. It was in David's columns, before I began the book, that I first read Proust's dismissal of the cinema: "Some critics now liked to regard the novel as a sort of procession of things upon the screen of a cinematograph.
I fell short of this ideal, sticking with the Everyman translation: that is, DJ Enright's revision of the Terence Kilmartin/CK Scott Moncrieff text, which popularised the title In Search of Lost Time, as opposed to the Shakespeare-derived Remembrance of Things Past. My fellow critic David Sexton has suggested readers should knuckle down to the original – with a French-English dictionary if necessary. It could be that Proust adaptations are unique in that they really must be experienced as an adjunct of the novel. I set out to do so, and became hooked – and then intrigued by the troubled history of Proust on film, and what it implies about the limits of screen adaptation.
Perhaps I was dyspeptic, unused to the Cannes routine of beginning one's film-watching day at 8:30am perhaps I was just ignorant and immature.Ībove all, though, the issue was simply that I hadn't read the book. To my shame, I wrote slightingly of the film at the time. He finds them all dramatically aged, about to take their final steps in the dance of death, but senses also the mysterious power of art to recover what time has taken away. The other centenary is similar in many ways: on 8 November 1913, Marcel Proust published the first volume of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, his monumental novel about memory, mortality and art, the belle époque, and the leisured and aristocratic classes of Paris, a city crammed in Proust's pages with the most vivid and extraordinary personalities, destined to be swept away by the Great War.įourteen years ago, at Cannes, I saw Raúl Ruiz's superlative screen adaptation of the final volume: Time Regained, in which the narrator, Marcel, is reunited with these people after a long spell away from Paris recovering from ill-health.
This year has been punctuated by a rash of anniversary-themed books and articles anticipating the first world war centenary, and indeed attempting snapshots of how Europe looked and felt in 1913, eerily poised on the precipice.
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