Portraits of a Vanished Era

Marcel Proust wrote great gossip. His epic novel, A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), is artful celebrity journalism about the beautiful people of Paris in the early 20th century. This was also when movies came of age; and the novel's shuffling of tenses, from present to past to conditional, has its film equivalent in the flashback--the lightning stroke of emotional teleportation that brings a memory instantly, poignantly, to the mind's eye.

The chic, assured film that Raul Ruiz has made of the novel's final volume, Le temps retrouve (Time Regained), is an ideal Proust in pictures. It roams through prewar drawing rooms, attending to whispers of malice and amour. A brilliant man (Marcello Mazzarella, as Marcel) talks to a ravishing woman (Emmanuelle Beart, as Gilberte) of an old wound. "Heartbreak can kill," he says, "but leaves no trace." The roue Charlus (John Malkovich) takes his sexual pleasures at the business end of a whip. These characters are often crushed by the burden of glamour, but the film isn't. It wears its gravity with a buoyant ease, seeing through walls, magically turning statues into people. It shows Marcel, as a child, watching himself as a young man--just as we all hit the replay button on our lives. Like the turn-of-the-20th-century fantasy films of Georges Melies, Time Regained reminds you that all cinema is a clever trick of the light.

At 2 hr. 42 min., Time Regained has its slow spots, especially during the war years, when the prime social occasions are the funerals of those lost in either war or melancholy. Even then, there are beguilements aplenty in the work of some of France's ageless actress-beauties: Beart, Catherine Deneuve, Arielle Dombasle, Edith Scob, Marie-France Pisier. In their smart frocks and pretty predicaments, they make Proust seem a fashion that could never go out of style. This is a serious filmgoer's treat: intelligence cloaked in elegance.