Le temps retrouvé

Adaptation, in Ruiz, is a complex operation of condensation and expansion, shifts and substitutions, a dream-work. In adapting Proust’s monumental Remembrance of Things Past, Ruiz’s method had to confront two main challenges. The first is a sort of abstract equivalence between Proust’s system of proliferating narratives and the Proustian theory of epiphanic memory. The second is the narrative division which never proceeds without a moment or point where everything gathers to form a horizon of meaning or the eye of a storm: unison, synchronicity, simultaneity are properly Ruizian obsessions. In Time Regained, the most successful moments are those in which the condensation of memories, the mise en scène of crossing ‘temporal lines’, do not open up the construction of an individual subjectivity (as in Proust), but rather a Zeitgeist of the 20th century. Ruiz could have worked through the list of fetish-figures in Remembrance of Things Past, but he rightly chose to turn it into a funeral litany, a vast multitude of phantoms bleached out by flashes, hollowed by recording, defeated by memory, and always already murdered by their epoch. A sickly film, among Ruiz’s most morbid, Time Regained succeeds in turning Proust’s madeleine into a kind of fatal epidemic. -Cyril Béghin