September 27, 2000

'Time Regained': Proust in the multiplex

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

So your son is past 30 and still living off his allowance. He refuses to get a job. All he does all day is listen to music and daydream about goodness knows what.

His trifling friends are always dragging him away to some party. Most days he says he doesn't feel well and won't even get out of bed. When you give him money, he squanders it on expensive things.

The only vaguely productive thing he does is scribble in a notebook, but what you've seen of the scribbling looks like a lot of navel-gazing. You've just about given up hope that he'll ever amount to anything.

Buck up - your boy could be the next Marcel Proust.

If you don't believe it, go see "Time Regained," the newly released film based on the last volume of Proust's fictional masterwork, "A la Recherchez du Temps Perdu." It will depict a fellow not unlike your son turning into one of the most celebrated writers in history.

Proust was born in Paris in 1871 and died in 1922, and during most of his life his mother and father, well-educated and affluent French bourgeois, and even his devoted friends thought he'd never amount to a hill of beans.

He was spoiled rotten by his parents' wealth, and the only thing that could get him out of bed sometimes was the chance to hear a Beethoven string quartet or go see the flowers blooming in the Champs E'Lysees. He suffered from asthma and also believed himself to be afflicted with just about every illness known to man.

Occasionally he jotted down a precious little essay for publication in a dandified Parisian newspaper called Figaro, and he had a habit of mooning around cathedral porches staring at the statues and other bric-a-brac.

To give him his due, he did publish translations of the British aesthete John Ruskin. On the other hand, he did so without having any real command of the English language.

Finally he used his parent's money to privately publish a book he called "Le Cote du Chez Swann," an expense that his parents  (and even his friends) regarded as yet another bootless extravagance.

Lo and behold, the book - the English translation of the title is "Swann's Way" - became a Paris phenomenon; a commercial publisher picked it up and it sold like French toast.

Then that deuced bore, World War I, intervened, delaying the publication of further volumes - for, yes, the lad (now in his 40s) was in the process of writing a huge work that would come to seven volumes.

The succeeding installments sold as phenomenally as the first and were acclaimed and loved by critics and readers all over France.
A slacker as always, Marcel didn't quite manage to finish the final drafts of the last couple of volumes before dying of untreated pneumonia in 1922, at age 51.

The work's first English translator called it "A Remembrance of Things Past," borrowing a phrase from Shakespeare, but later, more literal translators call the work in “Search of Lost Time." (No, that wasn't the title of an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation.")

One reason Proust's writing is deathless is precisely because he was  just like your no-account boy - just like millions of overgrown middle-class children who have never learned how to fend for themselves and spend all their time gossiping, listening to music and looking at pretty pictures. Proust, though, was the too-smart-for-his-own-good middle-class lay about who actually managed to put his eternal woolgathering into concrete form and send it off to the printer.

His work is highly cinematic on the one hand, filled with shockingly vivid visual images, and extremely wordy on the other. That dizzying lengthiness is one reason few filmmakers have attempted to translate Proust into their medium, although he is wildly loved by cinephiles.

A few years ago Jeremy Irons impersonated the great Proustian hero, Swann, a brilliant aristocrat who throws away his social standing and his peace of mind for the unrequited love of a shopworn little tart, in the art-house movie "Swann in Love." Years earlier, the playwright Harold Pinter wrote something with the working title “The Proust Screenplay," but today it's still only a screenplay.

The new "Time Regained," with John Malkovich as Swann and Catherine Deneuve as Swann's tart in her sunset years, is preceded by very positive word of mouth from the trans-Atlantic legion of Proust aficionados. Right now it’s playing at a theater near you. Take that overgrown boy of yours to see it, and on the way home, buy him a new notebook and a box of pencils.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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