Time Regained

Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation—an attempt to condense all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time into a single feature, using the seven-part novel’s last instalment as a kind of frame—is also one of his lushest, most transporting reflections on the power of films to seize and preserve moments of time. Beyond the consistent presence of Proust’s narrator, Marcel (Mazzarella), the film is dominated by entrancing, sometimes tragic figures that seem to drift in and out of the field of view: Catherine Deneuve as the stately former courtesan Odette de Crecy; Emmanuelle Béart as Marcel’s young love Gilberte; John Malkovich as the closeted, mysterious Baron de Charlus…