Time Regained Details

Such is the dazzling complexity of Marcel Proust's masterpiece novel Le Temps Retrouvé, it requires a film-maker of rare imagination to convey its multiple levels of meaning. As time elapses from the optimistic 1880s to the depressed 1920s, Chilean director Raúl Ruiz calls on all manner of technical strategies to blend narrative, memory, emotion and dream into a sublime cinematic experience. Surrounded by such luminaries as Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich, Marcello Mazzarella proves pivotal as Marcel, the writer whose life among the aristocracy becomes his art. Handsomely staged and acutely scripted, this triumph of technique and intellect is one of the finest literary adaptations of recent years.

An elegant production that plays tricks with time and space, eliding past and present and showing events from shifting perspectives; what it cannot do is finally persuade us that its parade iof characters warrants an audience's extended attention.