Un amour de film
Last night, TV5Monde (the Francophone cable station) broadcast Un Amour de Swann, the 1984 Volker Schlöndorff adaptation of the novella-within-the-novel by Marcel Proust, starring Jeremy Irons as a dubbed Charles Swann. I hate dubbing, and the voice chosen for Swann en français was nowhere near Mr Irons's baritone, but it was clear that the actor knew his lines, even if he couldn't say them. Once I realized that the movie could have been called Deux Jours de Swann, I was completely won over. The first day occurs in the 1880s, when Charles Swann is besotted with the courtesan Odette de Crécy. It takes up most of the footage. The second is an elegiac retrospective set on the eve of World War I, when Charles is dying.
Can you make movies out of A la recherche du temps perdu? Out of even a part of it? Raoul Ruiz made a gallant stab in 1999's Le temps retrouvé. Everybody who was anybody in French film, at least on the distaff side, was lined up to play one part or another, and by adapting the conceit that a drowning - here, dying - man sees his whole life passing before him, the project ended up being amazingly comprehensive for a movie that lasts only two and a half hours. Un amour de Swann is an entirely different animal, and in its way it's devilishly untrue to "the Marcel of the author." When it was over, I was positively attacked by the idea that the characters had escaped from Proust's novel and gone out for a night on their own; in a way, I don't think that the author would have disapproved. Schlöndorff gives us Odette, Charles, Charlus, Oriane de Guermantes, and Mme de Verdurin as they were, before Proust got hold of them and wrote them down in his book.
The broadcast was, inadvertently, saturated in a very Proustian passage of time. Jeremy Irons, Fanny Ardant - so young. Alain Delon (as Charlus) still young-ish. What a novel Proust would have written about film, and its preservation of the young, firm faces that we used to have. Un amour de Swann, despite every obstacle, is a success.
