GamerTab That was an excellent one.

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

chaos-rampant Ruiz was quite something back in the 80's, one of the most promising filmmakers I have recently discovered. He made films that throbbed with magic volition, with steps travelling inwards to the place where images are born. It was a dangerous cinema, sultry with the impossible.Then came the second phase, the period of maturity as it were. More prestigious films starting in the mid-90's, starring actors of standing (Mastroyanni, Huppert, here Deneuve and Malkovich) and with some clout of respectability. Watching these makes me cherish so much more the spontaneous upheaval of Three Crowns or City of Pirates.So, this is the landmark film of that second phase, a bulky, sprawling film about French writer Marcel Proust and his work. About sprawling deathbed recollections of a life lived, arranged into a story about stories in an attempt to reveal something of their machinations (and ours in weaving them in the mind, before or after the event).It is a noble effort, with multiple points of interest.Oh the sets are sumptuous, roomfuls of an impeccably dressed society at the doorstep of disaster—WWI is booming away in close proximity—who mingle in coquetry at the clinking sounds of fine glassware. Vice as the last means of sating a self that can never seem to please itself. Bunuel stuff.Charmingly amusing tidbits abound, sure—a scene at the funeral, for example, of a decorated general, whose wife takes solace in a stash of letters she discovered written by the deceased brave. We know, of course, that the love pouring out of them was no doubt intended for his secret homosexual lover.Now all of this as memory, with the narrator present and included in the scene of it. And then a camera—the internal narrator of memory—that introduces the distorted distance of time, this is quite marvelous, as actually reordering reality—furniture move around on whims, our narrator. Fine stuff so far.But, this really falls with Proust's ideas on the role of fiction, the thinking man so hopelessly removed from the actual, tangible things of life, that he can only find solace in turning them to their spiritual equivalents. Who instead of loving, can only write about love; who wastes the manifold possibilities of 'now!' in tinkering with dead time.Earlier filmmakers astutely exposed this destructive facet for what it is; a chimera of the mind that traps the soul in old films of memory. Resnais in his fascinating overall project about memory, Antonioni in Blowup, earlier yet it was film noir. Beckett has captured the dissication better than anyone, pungent stuff his. Ruiz by contrast romances the idea as though it was a pleasant stroll. He romances it so earnestly that it drains his entire film.It is all so fine—like the glassware—so refined and pliable with some grace of apparent form. But a form refined to the point of ornament and sofness, mere trinket that is hollow and devoid of life. No other filmmaker once promising I can think of, matured into so much indifference.

writers_reign Adapting Proust for the screen is akin to training a dog to walk on two legs, what matters is not how well you succeed but that you attempt it at all. To make it even more difficult Ruiz has elected to concentrate on the last volume of the magnum opus where all the characters of the first six volumes come together in his imagination as the narrator lies on his deathbed. Ruiz does what he can and offers some opulent settings, stunning camera work and first rate performances which is what you would expect when you are employing Manu Beart, Catherine Deneuve Pascal Greggory and John Malkovich buy even the supporting players are excellent and though it is a great help if one has read In Search Of Lost Time it is possible to enjoy this as a one-off.

Framescourer This is a thoughtful and carefully planned cinematic conversion of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It manages to preserve Proust's epicurean oeuvre in producing a film that introduces us to characters and their relationships with others, but layered through the eyes of (I counted four) different-aged Prousts.The chief Proust (not counting Patrice Chereau's narrator) is played brilliantly by Marcello Mazzarella - I thought of Adrian Brody posing for a three hour long portrait. The satellite characters closest in his conscious orbit are all competently taken by a mixture of A-list and never-heard-of, although I'd like to speak up for Pascal Gregory's colourful Saint-Loup and... John Malkovich's Charlus. I still can't come to love this actor, although his inscrutably cold style seems appropriate in this company and project. His one overacted scene is a clumsily overdubbed, single take sequence, so he probably thought it would be cut anyway.Accolades - and, I'm afraid the responsibility for the inconsistency of the film - rest at the door of Ruiz though. I was drawn to his light touch with the resurgent melancholy as Proust looks back on his life (Istvan Szabo manages a similar balance between weight and momentum in the contemporaneous Sunshine, but with a linear, rather than collage approach). The period observation is excellent, and the surreal episodes which are either smeared across the detail or bloom from it do not sink the film with their pretensions. However, the sense of structure, which takes time to emerge, is dealt a death blow with a half hour-overlong coda. In my ignorance, I suspect that this is an attempt to be faithful to the book. But it's unnecessary, and fatally oversaturates a beautifully delivered, if not compelling conceit. 5/10

simuland TIME REGAINED (Fr., dir. Raul Ruiz, 165 min.) doesn't even pretend to stand on its own; is an homage useless and unintelligible to anyone who hasn't read and remembered Remembrance of Things Past. Having digested only the first 2 of the 7 novels which comprise this opus, and this long enough ago to have allowed memory of them to deteriorate, I confess much of the film remained beyond me. But even with the book as scorecard, the film functions as hardly more than a metasoap opera, a costume pageant of the book's characters who parade by, talk and walk, without ever coming to life. Nothing much happens onscreen; the movie is practically void of action. Despite impeccable staging, it consists largely of one conversation after another, endless scenes of dinners, lunches, social gatherings, etc., in which people dispassionately discuss events and relationships that have already transpired elsewhere. To make up for this, Ruiz moves furniture about, has near and far fields migrate disjointedly in opposite directions, litters the screen with symbols and leitmotivs, and mingles different times in the same frame, so that, like Bruce Willis in Disney's Kid, Proust observes, is observed by, and even converses with his younger self. Scenes shift so fluidly back and forth through time that one easily gets lost, disoriented, unless thoroughly familiar with the book. The movie fails, has to fail, because of the impossibility of translating the book to film. The book is too introverted, too subjective, too fundamentally static and multilayered. Cinema-time is linear and dynamic; even though it can create the illusion of multiple things happening at once, it is restricted to a sequence of events, actions, happening one after another, one at a time, all of which are, above all, visual, graphic, right there before your eyes. The novel, however, layers the past on the present so that the two effectively coexist, are simultaneous; and delves into subjective states and ideas, interweaves mood, reminiscence, and philosophizing inseparably with place and person. The subject of time and memory, as elusive and evocative as it is on the page, is near nigh impossible to get hold of with film, that most literal and physical of mediums. It's like trying to photograph the passage of mist, of fog--all you see is a mess of grey. The movie also fails because it can only gloss the myriad details with which the novels slowly, deliberately mount their magnificent edifice. In the end, all you get here is a rushed visit, a mad dash through a museum of images, a disordered travelogue of the psyche.