Rosenbaum, an ardent Ruiz champion, once described him as one of cinema's "more literary" directors. Perhaps he worded it differently. Maybe he said "most" instead of "more" or simply described him as a literary director. The idea intrigued me, as I have taken steps towards moving away from an idea of a pure cinema -- that the camera's placement and the cutting from one shot to the next is the idea to be held above all others. That a film must first succeed at that before other ideas, themes, explorations should be warranted. It's a little bit of a silly idea. I still like it, especially as it pertains to action films. But it is reductive, when movies are capable of so much beyond those two things. So I went into Time Regained without knowing anything about it, save the idea Rosenbaum planted in my head, and that it would star Catherine Deneuve.
A little over an hour later I walked out, with probably another hour and change left to go. Perhaps if I'd done a little more research, and discovered that it was based on Marcel Proust's most famous novel, the enormous tome Remembrance of Things Past, I might have been more adequately prepared for the movie, its setting, characters and the way it moved through time. I had scarcely heard of the book before I saw the movie, and I continue to be mostly unaware of it save its title and notoriety. But it still might've given me something to hold onto, to help wade through the dense forest of faces, many mustachioed men that I could not tell from one another. A flowing and ebbing tide of names and people, unsure who was supposed to be who or when was supposed to be when. As it was, I had no basis for entry into this film and I could not reasonably justify watching more, as all I felt was a strange bored frustration, unable to access what I was being shown and just feeling sad and alienated. I am partially willing to admit that the fault is my own, or, at least, the movie is not for me. In a way, it's kind of wonderful and admirable that Ruiz was able to make a pretty well-budgeted adaptation of a French novel that is, quite probably, only for the people who have read it.
But, having said that, what little I could access cinematically told me that I needed access to anything else to get something out of it. The cinema, as one might expect from a director labeled "literary," was a mostly dull series of stiff shots broken up by mostly silly surrealist touches. And I mean silly as in ridiculous, rather than whimsical. Mostly they have a touch of whimsy, but are too clumsily handled to come off as charming. A prime example would be a scene in which a young Marcel enters a room. Across the room is an older man, and between them the floor is scattered with men's hats, like a landmine. It's a strong image, that perhaps suggests the impending war and likens it to adulthood. But then Marcel begins to make his way through the hat field by walking rigidly towards a hat, pausing, and then hopping over it in an exceptionally mannered fashion. This pushes it too far, trying to achieve a dreamlike state that is, I would guess, unlike dreams almost anybody has. It is too arch, too self-conscious and robs it of whatever power it had before. The similarly shifting furniture, gliding back and forth across the floor, is more contrivance than cute. Though a sequence in which a man appears to rise up off a ballroom floor seamlessly is nice, and unexpected. I guess this suggests that Ruiz through all his ideas at the cinematic canvas, hoping that some would work well enough to offset the ones that didn't. For Rosenbaum, and maybe others, they did. For me, not as much.
I haven't given the film a rating, being that I feel uncomfortable assigning it a negative number simply because I walked out of it. I wasn't prepared to give it a decent shot. And, even if I had been, it is in all likelihood a movie that is not for me, given that the chances of me reading a 4300 page book ever in my lifetime, no matter how good it is, are completely unlikely.
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