Film: Proustitution - Marcel Proust's novel adapted

Some popular, even trashy, novels have been made into good movies, infidelities to the original rightly eliciting few tears. But what of the adaptations of great novels, classics or recent masterpieces, including what may be the greatest modern novel, Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, formerly Englished as Remembrance of Things Past; now, more properly, as In Search of Lost Time?

Many famous directors-though, interestingly, no French ones-have toyed with adapting parts or even all of this roman fleuve, with pages running into thousands. But how, without betraying the author, exasperating the experts, and shortchanging the public? I would be for leaving it alone, but perhaps Everest must be climbed because, as they say, it is there.

The first serious attempt was Harold Pinter's scenario for the director Joseph Losey, which grandiosely tried to tackle the entire work and, understandably, never got made. Pinter published it in book form as The Proust Screenplay in 1977. In 1984, the vastly overrated German director Volker Schlondorff made Swann in Love, from the first of the seven novels that together constitute Search. Except visually, it was poor, with Jeremy Irons as Swann giving a somnambulistic and soporific performance. A short summary of what is good and bad about these attempts can be found in Roger Shattuck's just- published book Proust's Way; my concern here is with Raul Ruiz's Time Regained, a film version of the seventh and last constituent of Search that opened here last month.

Ruiz, a prolific Chilean living in Paris, has made 90-odd films, most of which I have avoided. They are slapdash, frivolous, campy-think of a lesser Pedro Almodovar. Here, however, he has made a more considered, respectable, elaborately produced film from a screenplay by Gilles Taurand and himself, in French and with decent subtitles. That the director is, as Proust was, a homosexual may be counted an advantage. Although the novel deals magisterially with heterosexual relationships, there are also various homosexual ones; a widespread theory holds that the protagonist's mistress, the flighty Albertine, is based on Albert, Proust's chauffeur.

Time Regained, the novel, ties together the many strands and characters of the entire work. The real protagonist is time, and the changes wrought by it in individuals, society, the world. Next in importance are the profound differences in everyone according to the vantage points of different observers- character is really in the eye of the beholder. Further, the novel is about the role of art as that which captures and bestows permanence on fluid, fleeting life. And about memory, the novelist's chief muse, as Proust's work is largely based on real people and events remembered, then molded, recombined, transmuted.

What a tall-not to say impossible-order for the filmmaker, who here has 165 minutes for Proust's roughly 430 pages chock-full of recapitulation, reinterpretation, and reassessment. So Taurand and Ruiz jump around like springboks from flashback to flashback, fragment the novel into disjunct tesserae reassembled into a near-abstract mosaic, and bring in enigmatic references to the work's earlier installments.

The result is a scrambling, a laby rinth, a mystery for the uninitiated, and quite a workout even for those who have read the book. At my second viewing, this time in a movie house, a few people left after a shorter or longer while, but most persevered, perhaps in the vain hope of clarification in the final reel, which, actually, is the most confusing. It is a grand party and recital at which aging and social upheavals have left everyone altered in appearance and social position, and malicious gossip summarizes everybody's transformations, rises, or falls. For the average moviegoer, totally bewildering.

Missing, of course, is Proust's masterly prose style with its minute observations, philosophic speculations, and epigrammatic pungency, often in page-long architectonic and musical sentences. The cineaste's equivalent is the extended and complex shot, with the peripatetic camera capturing elaborate goings-on without cutting. We get some of this from Ruiz, but without the supreme lucidity of the assured master.

One of the difficulties is the novel's dual point of view: that of the nominal protagonist, the semifictional, semiautobiographical Marcel, who is and isn't Proust, and that of the Narrator, who is. The film tries to tackle this by beginning with Proust in bed in the last phase of his illness (he died in 1922, aged 51), tended by his faithful servant Celeste. His asthmatic breathing permeates the soundtrack as he takes photographs out of a casket, contemplates and identifies them as the chief characters of the story, which takes off from there. Marcel is shown at three different ages and eventually merges with the Narrator, but of course not in that lineal order. The typical moviegoer feels like someone entering a long conversation about unknown people well past the middle.