Time Regained

In France in the early 1920s an old writer lies dying. He looks at photographs and the people he knew across his life come back: salons, aristocrats, the war years, jealousy over a woman, and faces changing with time. Memory does not obey chronology; different years occupy the same room at once. Raúl Ruiz adapts the final volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Rather than turning a text considered unadaptable into a plot, Ruiz turns it into form: furniture slides of its own accord, the camera follows both the character and the one remembering, and rooms move like stage sets. Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Vincent Perez and John Malkovich are in the cast, with Malkovich as the Baron de Charlus. The film competed at Cannes in 1999. Who it's for: Viewers who like literary adaptation, formal experiment, and the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. Who it's not for: The characters become impossible to tell apart for a viewer who does not know the novel. It also runs long and the narrative is deliberately loose.