Swann in Love

I have been late in posting this. I was somewhat apprehensive about putting it here because I had seen the movie quite sometime back. I wanted to see it again and also read some parts of the book again before adding my own thoughts but didn't get much time. Anyway it is here for whatever it is worth (with a personal note in the end):

A film adaptation of In Search of Lost Time has long been the holy grail for filmmakers. There have been numerous attempts to bring Proust's novel to screen but very few have succeeded. Francois Truffaut scoffed at the idea when the project was offered to him. Later Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay cramming the entire book into what could have been a six hour film had it ever been made. Not surprisingly Pinter and his director Joseph Losey couldn't find anyone to finance the film. There is also a very innovative attempt by the Chilean-born director Raul Ruiz who chose the last volume to adapt. More on it sometime later. It is with this background and understanding of how daring an endeavour it must be to bring the book to the big screen that one should appreciate German director's Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of a section of the book - the chapter "Swann in Love" of the first volume. So even though it is not an entirely successful effort, it is still a laudable one.

Schlondorff is a director with very impressive credentials. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of "German new cinema" movement alongwith Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge and others. What makes his credentials even stronger is that he has proved himself specially adept in past at translating complex and serious works of literature to screen. I haven't seen many of his films yet but I have liked whatever I have so far. I specially love his adaptation of Musil's Young Torless, again an extremely impressive feat given how complex and introspective the book really is. Like all good literary adaptations it enriches the experience of reading a book, rather than just providing a sort of illustrated reading guide. He is immeasurably helped by the music score he chose for the film which was composed by German avant-garde composer Hans Werner Henze (I am not really familiar with his work outside this film.) Schlondorff of course also adapted Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum which is probably his most famous film since it won both an Oscar for best foreign film and Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

Coming back to "Swann in Love," Schlondorff wisely chose just one episode from the novel to film. Swann in Love is specially appropriate since in addition to being a somewhat self-contained narrative, it also introduces to the reader not only most of the characters in the novel but also the subjects and themes that are explored in more depth and detail later in the book - the nature of sexual infatuation, the feelings of self-disgust, pain and jealousy that accompany any unrequited or unreciprocated erotic relationship, intermittences of the heart which are always creating newer and newer ways of tormenting one's self with doubts and self-reproaches, the intimations of one's own mortality, role of art and aesthetic experience in deepening our self-knowledge and authenticity of existence and of course the way involuntary memory works - how physical sensations sometimes overwhelm us by bringing us face to face with events and feelings from the past, proving in effect the essential non-linearity of our experience in time. The story is also told from a third-person point of view which leaves out the difficulties of finding appropriate visual analogues of those long sentences describing internal thoughts and sensations of the narrator.

The film telescopes the events of the narrative into twenty four hours. It is a clever decision and it works very well. Only it assumes that the viewer is already familiar with the story because the occasional flashbacks which intercut the linear narrative repeatedly last only for a brief while. (So one should already know about the siginificance of Orchids flower (cattleyas) to really appreciate what is going on when Swann tries to "fix" the flowers on Odette's bosom.) When the film starts Swann is already in thrall of his erotic fixation. The rest of the day is just a sequence of one humiliation after another for him, as he tries to find out whether she is a lesbian and had female lovers, gets some advice from Baron de Charlus, attends a dinner party at the Verdurins and mistakes someone else's apartment at night for Odette's. The film ends with a flashforward in which Swann and Charlus, both now old, discuss mortality and meanings of their lives.

The film obviously has the advantage when it comes to depicting costumes, set-design and the way props are used in the background and Swann in Love really excels in all these departments. It is specially fitting because the central character is such an aesthete. For him nothing is beautiful and worthy of his attention unless it is validated by art. Odette is herself a vulgar whore until his passion for her makes him find her reflected in a figure in the painting and she is transformed into a sublime object of desire!

Jeremy Irons and Alain Delon are both okay in the roles of Swann and Charlus but it is the French-Italian actress Ornella Muti who steals the show as Odette. Her beauty, at least the way Schlondorff presents it to us, is far from conventional. Seeing her one really understands what Swann meant in his final comment when he says, "To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I had my greatest love for a woman who didn't really attract me, who wasn't my type." She looks like an ordinary coquetress but she also has a great erotic pull. She might not be your "type" but if you are around her for even a small time you are gone. The "orchids" episode in the book frankly came across as mildly funny to me if not embarrassing (I always thought it was meant to be a substitute of actually making love, which it actually is in a way because in the film also it serves as a sort of foreplay) but in the film the scene is genuinely erotic and Schlondorff acheives it without showing much skin. I have always complained of the general lack of tasteful eroticism in movies when as a medium it is so much more capable of it than other media and in this sense the film is quite successful. To my disappointment the peripheral characters are not given much screen time. If you are already familiar with the "Verdurin set", you might be able to appreciate the jokes and personal tics. Even then there is a delightfully grotesque little scene in which Dr. Cottard fixes the Mme. Verdurin's jaw which dislocated laughing at a vulgar joke. The snobbery, anti-semitism, hierachy of social circles are all alluded too but mostly end up as being tokenist. None of these is really dwelt upon at any length. But then you can cram only a limited amount of narrative in two-hours. Given all the limitations, as I earlier said, it is a laudable effort if not an entirely successful or overwhelming one.

A Personal Digression

Before I end a bit of personal digression (at the risk of embarrassing myself in public). When I first read this section, it had some sort of an amplifier-effect on me. I was going through some minor emotional problems of my own at that time, which in retrospect now look ridiculous and risible, and reading Proust transformed those minor problems into questions of life and death (well, almost). I tried to read it again last year and it had no such effect. I was trying to search for that old experience again but without success. Instead I was a little annoyed and made impatient by all the philosophizing spun around the notions of unrequited-love, jealousy and unknowability of other self. I was more drawn to impersonal ideas and aspects of structure and style, specially what Proust says about the nature and role of art and artistic experience in our lives. I am probably taking the argument too far, but might it be the same Proustian notion that with time we are able to see our own lives as a work of art, as a novel ready to be put into words by disentagling oneself from the messy complications of unfulfilled desires, regrets and feelings of loss? Reading, writing and thinking (aesthetic reflection) itself as acts of mourning which enables you to move on in life? Does it have anything to do with the "consolation" that Antonia talked about in the first post on the blog?