The challenge for the filmmaker is to create a visual style that equals Proust's prose. And, I'd guess, that's true of most "adapted" works for the screen...particularly literary masterpieces. For some, just the attempt might be enough. But the film--after a decade--is already dated, stilted and stuffy. I'm not sure you can say the same about Proust's voluminous works. Ultimately, it comes down to the viewer's taste and willingness to go along with Ruiz' project of a dream-like rendering with surrealist effects. I didn't. While Proust's literary attempt to recapture the past may alter the reality he's reconstructing, his exquisite words aren't in the least surreal, they make the reader soar.. The film is beautiful and clever, but it moves at a glacial pace. And while Proust's works are hefty in the page count, for the reader they glide effortlessly. This film is full of artifice, melodrama and quickly forgotten. Which has nothing to do with it's source, an excursion into a life thoroughly lived and beautifully recorded for the ages.
Review of Marcel Proust's Time Regained
