There are artfully self-conscious moments in Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999) which distract us briefly from the film’s amazing achievement: to reveal the last volume of Proust’s intellectual monument (and by implication the rest of the work) for the intricate social soap opera it also is, a universe of stars appropriately represented by Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart and others. The director thoroughly understood Proust’s fascination with the world he has his narrator pretend to become so weary of. In Mysteries of Lisbon, Ruiz doesn’t exactly reverse his strategy, but he does start from an old-fashioned literary soap opera and arrive at what many critics (and awarders of prizes) have taken to be high art.

LRB 5 January 2012 | PDF Download