Time Regained

A tedious, pretentious, rhetorical attempt to film Marcel Proust's deliberately formless deathbed novel, Time Regained mixes the author's memories with characters and events from his books as it trips around in a Turn of the Century dreamscape like a bourgeoisie Alice In Wonderland set inside a René Magritte painting. Handsome, abstractly photographed, heavily symbolic, immersed in thought and strongly acted, it tracks a detached Proust himself (or is it?) through a world of over-educated dandies, lost loves, relatives, revolutionaries, soldiers, gossips, philosophers, musicians and idle rich men dabbling in homosexuality. But it's nearly impossible to follow since all of these real/surreal episodes zip by in moments with no apparent structure. A fine cast, including Marcello Mazzarella, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Vincent Perez, John Malkovich and Pascal Greggory, can't redeem this frustratingly cryptic cinematic exercise. Not recommended. (R. Blackwelder)