This year has been punctuated by a rash of anniversary-themed books and articles anticipating the first world war centenary, and indeed attempting snapshots of how Europe looked and felt in 1913, eerily poised on the precipice. The other centenary is similar in many ways: on 8 November 1913, Marcel Proust published the first volume of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, his monumental novel about memory, mortality and art, the belle époque, and the leisured and aristocratic classes of Paris, a city crammed in Proust's pages with the most vivid and extraordinary personalities, destined to be swept away by the Great War.
Fourteen years ago, at Cannes, I saw Raúl Ruiz's superlative screen adaptation of the final volume: Time Regained, in which the narrator, Marcel, is reunited with these people after a long spell away from Paris recovering from ill-health. He finds them all dramatically aged, about to take their final steps in the dance of death, but senses also the mysterious power of art to recover what time has taken away. To my shame, I wrote slightingly of the film at the time. Perhaps I was dyspeptic, unused to the Cannes routine of beginning one's film-watching day at 8:30am; perhaps I was just ignorant and immature.
Above all, though, the issue was simply that I hadn't read the book. I set out to do so, and became hooked – and then intrigued by the troubled history of Proust on film, and what it implies about the limits of screen adaptation. It could be that Proust adaptations are unique in that they really must be experienced as an adjunct of the novel.
My fellow critic David Sexton has suggested readers should knuckle down to the original – with a French-English dictionary if necessary. I fell short of this ideal, sticking with the Everyman translation: that is, DJ Enright's revision of the Terence Kilmartin/CK Scott Moncrieff text, which popularised the title In Search of Lost Time, as opposed to the Shakespeare-derived Remembrance of Things Past. It was in David's columns, before I began the book, that I first read Proust's dismissal of the cinema: "Some critics now liked to regard the novel as a sort of procession of things upon the screen of a cinematograph. This comparison is absurd. Nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the vision that the cinematograph presents." Although, rereading that passage, it strikes me now that it is not a clear-cut dismissal of the cinema as art.
So should a film-maker try to encompass the whole, gigantic thing? Or is that like Monty Python's Summarise Proust competition? Should the director, conversely, stick to one single volume? Or is there something unsatisfying and baffling about that, in that it detaches characters from the larger context, making them even more difficult to keep track of? Trying the whole thing is putting a quart in a pint pot. Doing one volume is a pint in a quart pot.
Dirk Bogarde, who had been approached by both Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey to act in their various doomed Proust projects, wrote that audiences – the non-Proustian laity – might be perplexed in any event: "Will they know who is who? Or what is what?" It's a fair question.
As things stand, the only attempt at a complete, conventional dramatic adaptation is the somewhat odd 2011 version for French television, written for the screen and directed by Nina Companeez. The whole thing is reduced to two feature-length episodes; it whizzes past like a breezy daytime soap. The first and most famous volume, Swann's Way, is truncated almost to nothing, Swann himself – the aesthete and collector whose life and obsessive love make such an impression on Marcel, and whose Judaism is at the centre of Proust's observations on antisemitism and the Dreyfus affair – is reduced to a cameo. His mistress-turned-wife Odette vanishes from the story entirely. Mischa Lesca, playing the young narrator Marcel, has a stilted, pop-eyed look – although his difficulties are those of any actor in this role. Are you expected to convey the rich, dense textual material of Proust's writing with gurning facial expressions?
Aside from that, the film writer and Guardian obituarist Ronald Bergan has written about his participation in a massive, open-ended video project, aimed at encompassing the whole book, called Le Baiser De La Matrice by Veronique Aubouy, in which thousands of different people will each read a single page of Proust's novel to the camera in a location of their own choosing.
In fact, the three substantial Proust films that have seen the light of day, or rather the light of the film projector, are single-volume adaptations: Volker Schlöndorff's Swann in Love (1984), based on the first volume; Ruiz's Time Regained (1999), based on the last; and Chantal Akerman's The Captive (2000), based on the fifth volume, The Prisoner, in which Marcel invites the beautiful young Albertine to live with him in the family apartment.
Before this, movie history is littered with expensive, heart-breaking Proust failures. The landscape is invisibly strewn with unused costumes and sets. Actor and producer Nicole Stéphane (otherwise the Baroness Nicole de Rothschild), having acquired the rights in the early 1960s, tried without success to interest François Truffaut in filming Swann's Way. Then Visconti was brought in, a more obvious candidate who was said to carry a copy of Proust with him at all times, bound in red leather. Eventually, Visconti abandoned the film, perhaps overwhelmed by the task and perhaps secretly scared by the possible humiliation of getting it wrong – though he had his "Proustian" moments in The Leopard (1963), with its final ball scene, and Death in Venice (1971), in which the sequences at the Hotel Des Bains on the Lido resemble those at Balbec in Proust's novel.
In the 1970s, it was the turn of Losey, who in a similar way had to drop his plans for the whole thing when funds dried up. But his À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (1972) is a great lost film, or ghost film, or imaginary film, because in 1978 Harold Pinter published the screenplay Losey commissioned from him, and it is fascinating to read this while attempting to "play" the movie in your head. The running time was estimated at just under four hours, which is about the reading time. Perhaps all directors should create an unproduced project like the Losey/Pinter Proust, a DIY film that viewers must conjure up for themselves.
Pinter's Proust screenplay is a bold, radical compression or distillation: all the textual richness and amplitude is boiled away, and we are left with an audacious repatterning, a series of stark, fragmentary glimpses. It is a brilliant and very Pinteresque reading of Proust, with a real passion for the work. David Caute's biography of Losey amusingly quotes one derisive non-backer: "This is the age of Gene Hackman and Barbra Streisand. There are no roles for them here." Actually, given John Malkovich's great success in Ruiz's Time Regained as the cantankerous sensualist and snob Baron de Charlus, I'm not so sure; Hackman might have made a good, fussy Dr Cottard.
Schlöndoff's Swann in Love (1984) is the most conventional attempt, and for those unfamiliar with the book the most accessible and explicable film. It's a handsomely furnished, well upholstered adaptation of the first volume, Swann's Way, which addresses Swann's liaison with the courtesan Odette and makes it serve as a standalone drama of obsessive love. Jeremy Irons plays the elegant bachelor Swann with poise and distinction, and his success probably later landed him with similar, but less interesting epicure-connoisseur parts in Louis Malle's Damage (1992) and Adrian Lyne's Lolita (1997).
Irons is especially good at the end, when he is older and frail: this adaptation uses the sequence from the end of volume three, The Guermantes Way, when Swann has to tell the Duchess of Guermantes that he will not be coming to Venice with her because he is dying. But so much of the nuance is lost by detaching Swann from the story of Marcel and Gilberte, and indeed that of Marcel and Albertine, and the casting looks questionable now: Ornella Muti is not especially interesting as Odette, and the moustachioed Alain Delon looks self-conscious and constrained as the goatish Charlus. Yet the film is carried off with some style, and it is possibly Irons's finest hour.
Ruiz's Time Regained (1999) is a wonderful film to revisit: a re-enactment of the final volume, Le Temps Retrouvé. At times, it is like an expressionist ballet, or impossibly sophisticated magic lantern show, or puppet theatre. Ruiz contrives an almost seamless robe of past and present and, as with his Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), also manages to create a cinematic style that engages with the literary past tense. The choreography of his camera movements is as daring and fluid as Max Ophüls's, but dizzyingly complicated by having whole sections of the cast in group scenes move like figures on an intricate music box that stirs into life when wound.
The Italian actor Marcello Mazzarella does well in the difficult role of Marcel himself: in one scene, transported by a musical performance, he inclines his head, with a hand against the cheek, in order to recall the famous author photograph. While walking with Gilberte, played by Emmanuelle Béart, Marcel is surprised by a lightning storm and the couple have to take cover. It is a fascinatingly artificial moment. The flash in their faces looks as if it has been achieved with a simple light meter from behind the camera, and the thin "sheet" of rain looks as artificial as it traditionally does in the movies. Yet the contrivance is absolutely assured and conjures up a fabricated quality, the animation of a colour plate in a book, created by memory and directed by art.
Mazzarella is upstaged by some outstandingly good performances. Pascal Greggory is unbeatable as Marcel's old friend Robert de Saint-Loup, and Malkovich could not be bettered as the licentious gay Baron de Charlus. He captures all the character's qualities, acidly fastidious disapproval, airy assertion of wealth and breeding, entitlement, decadence, and the hauteur of a sensualist and satirist. His decline into extreme age is an actor's tour de force. It's impossible to forget his contemptuous and dismissive bow to a lady in the street – almost bent double. However, surely Catherine Deneuve's natural presence and queenliness would have made her better casting as the Duchess of Guemantes, and not Odette?
Perhaps the only thing I'm still not sure about is Ruiz's rendering of the famous passage in the book in which Marcel returns to Paris after many years away and can't get over the pantomime absurdity of looking old: it is as if these people have painted their hair white and inflated their bellies and cheeks. Ruiz doesn't convey the same dramatic difference.
Perhaps the most extraordinary film to revisit is Akerman's The Captive, released a year later, in 2000. The film is a close reworking and updating of volume five, La Prisonnière, in which the narrator keeps Albertine in his family apartment (notionally, as a guest; he is here renamed Simon and she Ariane. This is a quasi-conjugal arrangement, but without the frankness and intimacy of a marriage, and a relationship in which Ariane has effectively consented to be his captive, permitted into his bed infrequently and basically for frottage and dry humping, after which she is fastidiously, if politely, requested to absent herself. It is a domesticised version of the alienated gentleman/mistress relationship, and perhaps a "collapsed" re-enactment of Swann's passion for Odette, though with distinctive aspects. This is a family home, not a bachelor establishment, which is perhaps why the arrangement need not outrage public opinion: his parents are absent, though his adored grandmother is on the scene, and Simon will unselfconsciously at moments of great emotional trial burst into her bedroom and embrace her.
In any other context, such a film would look like a psychological noir, leading inexorably to a finale of violence. Not here. As a piece of cinema, it is generically unknowable, intensifying the mystery. Ariane, the prisoner, is treated with the obsessive scrutiny one might lavish on an errant lover – constantly quizzed about her comings and goings. She is spied upon, and the inconsistencies in her subsequent account of the day's events coldly noted. Ariane is questioned about her apparently lesbian tendencies, though never openly confronted on the point, and their relations are always conducted at an impossibly refined level of courtesy and even solicitude, no matter how dysfunctional the situation. The closest Simon comes to overtly losing his temper is dragging Ariane out of a party given by the beautiful and fashionable actress Léa; Ariane simply complies with the mildest possible shrug. She does not feel humiliated, and he does not feel angry – at least not on that surface level of emotional demonstration where most ordinary non-Proustian mortals conduct their human relationships (although in the film's final moments, made all the more moving for their reserve, Ariane expresses her bafflement at his obsession with knowing everything about her, and declares that her feelings for him are kept alive because he keeps something back).
Rereading my original review of The Captive, I can see that without any knowledge of the source material, I was condemned to bafflement – although an intrigued bafflement – at how opaque and enigmatic this film is. Simon is played by Stanislas Merhar, Ariane by Sylvie Testud, and a young Bérénice Bejo – later to find fame in Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011) and Asghar Farhadi's The Past (2013) – plays Sarah, one of Ariane's gay friends. Merhar is a picture of clenched misery, eyes blazing with cold agony at the unknowability of women and other people generally. For any actor in this part, there must be a tendency to give him a kind of moustachioed airiness, a sad smile playing about the lips, as if he is already savouring all those paradoxes and nuances that he will later bring into the act of writing. But Merhar's performance precedes this, and adds a continuing, swallowed pain to someone who is a startling medley of eccentric attributes: elderly invalid, pampered child, unworldly aesthete, reserved scholar – and cosseted, moneyed adult.
From the very first, there is something captivatingly strange about The Captive. At the wheel of his bulbous Rolls-Royce (a not entirely inappropriate touch of Proustian Anglophilia?), moody, broody Simon follows Ariane as she drives around Paris in her open-topped sports car. It is very Hitchcockian. In his old-fashioned vehicle, and in his heavy suit and topcoat, Simon seems to come from Hitchcock's 50s or 60s, at any rate an epoch much earlier than Ariane's – though not the beautiful epoch itself. Rewatching The Captive, I felt how similar it was to another film about a connoisseur's obsession: José Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia (2007).
There is something so eerily detached in the dialogue scenes between Simon and Ariane (who of course never do anything as banal as discuss their "relationship") that it is quite possible to suspect some kind of M Night Shyamalan-type payoff is going to be served up. It could be that the whole situation is a complex erotic game in which everyone, not merely Simon and Ariane, are participants. But perhaps it is more that Akerman has intuited the somnambulist quality of La Prisonnière – and "sleepwalking" is of course a commonplace analogy for the behaviour of Europe's governing classes in the year before the Great War. It is a great stylised prose-poem of desire and despair.
These are the three great tilts at Proust, all notable on their own terms, and yet they are inevitably incomplete if they don't lead you back to the book. And my own experience of reading Proust is that nothing can prepare you for how paradoxically incomplete the work itself feels – no matter how colossal it seems to the reader, that reader is always aware of a great deal withheld.
There is something else, too. For any journalist, surely, one of its most glorious passages is in the sixth volume, Albertine Disparue, or The Fugitive, where we are privy to the feelings of Marcel, the would-be writer, on getting his first article published in Le Figaro. Why is this passage not taught in every journalism school? Why is it not anthologised in every collection about journalism? We read of Marcel's childlike excitement in trying to recreate how someone would feel just chancing across his article ("I opened the paper carelessly as would such a reader, even assuming the air of not knowing what there was this morning in my paper …"). And then – the comic masterpiece! – Marcel orders his maid Françoise out to buy more copies of that day's Le Figaro, ostensibly so he can give them to friends, but really so he can read his article in duplicate, triplicate, side-by-side with itself, wide-eyed with astonishment at the phenomenon of many different people reading his article, and having different thoughts about it. Amazing! This inspired passage is enough to cure any journalist of being jaded about the privilege of writing things that other people read. For me, it brought back my excitement at my first own publication: a piece in Auberon Waugh's Literary Review in 1988.
And now of course all that remains is to return to volume one and begin again, in French this time.
