Deneuve does Proust: with Catherine Deneuve and two of her kids in his cast, director Raoul Ruiz captures the genius and gay subtext of Proust's masterpiece.

Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouve) * Written by Raoul Ruiz and Gilles Taurand, from the novel by Marcel Proust * Directed by Raoul Ruiz * Starring Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Vincent Perez, John Malkovich * Sundance Channel; premieres May 3, 9 P.M. Eastern/ Pacific (check local listings)

How do you make a film out of the longest, most densely plotted, and most intellectually challenging novel ever written? Dive right into the deep end. That's what director Raoul Ruiz has done with this extraordinary 1999 adaptation of Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (long known as Remembrance of Things Past in English but more appropriately translated as In Search of Lost Time).

Many have tried to bring this unwieldy seven-volume work to the screen. Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay for Joseph Losey that was never filmed. Suso Checchi d'Amico did the same for Luchino Visconti. Volker Schlondorff, working with scriptwriters Peter Brooks and Jean-Claude Carriere, managed to bring one part of Proust's novel to fitful cinematic life with Swarm in Love (1984).

A highly prolific avant-garde writer director whose work often suggests Jorge Luis Borges on LSD, Ruiz wouldn't appear to be Proustian. But not only is Ruiz up to the challenge, he is one of the few straight filmmakers besides Wong Kar-Wai to "get" same-sex attraction. Dealing with gay life in Parisian society as no work before or since has ever done, A la Recherche laid bare a world in which sexual fluidity ruled supreme. And to this day scholars are arguing its whys and wherefores.

While nominally based on Le Temps Retrouve, the last section of Proust's masterpiece, Ruiz's film (coscripted with Proust scholar Gilles Taurand) evokes characters and incidents from the entire magnum opus. It's an excellent strategy, since Proust himself brought back many characters from earlier sections while writing Le Temps Retrouve, which was inspired by his attendance at a party just after World War I. A favored intellectual pet of belle epoque salons, Proust was astonished at how much had changed in the world he thought he knew. And so he set about recapitulating his entire life just to explain what had happened at that one party.

For his part, Ruiz brings together some of the finest performers in world cinema to make Proust come alive. Catherine Deneuve is the embodiment of heartbreaker Odette, and Deneuve's daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, is perfectly cast as Albertine. Emmanuelle Beart shines as Odette's daughter, Gilberte, as does Marie-France Pisier as Madame Verdurin. Pascal Greggory is perfect as the bisexual Saint-Loup, and Vincent Perez bewitches as his sometime lover and all-purpose boy toy Morel. But the knockout performance belongs to John Malkovich as the ultradecadent Baron de Charlus. The scene in which he visits a male brothel is one of this film's many high points.

The standout cast also includes Deneuve's son, Christian Vadim, as well as Arielle Dombasle, Edith Scob, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Helene Surgere, Georges Du Fresne (the young transgendered boy of Ma Vie en Rose) as the young Proust, and director Patrice Chereau (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) dubbing Italian actor Marcello Mazzarella, who plays Proust later in life. Ruiz has created a film that is as essential for every gay or lesbian to see as its source material is for us to read.