Swann in love.

Swann in Love

IS THERE A film director today who, beyond his basic lack of talent, is more contemptible than Volker Schlondorff? This man has taken it upon himself to destroy the greatest number of literary masterpieces possible by turning them into films, and, on top of that, his films. A fellow of some education, he ought to know that a masterwork of fiction cannot be adapted to the screen, and that to do such an adaptation is always an act of vulgarization. Yet Schlondorff has made movies of Musil's Young Torless (which he turned into a simplistic parable about military schools as the breeding ground for Nazism--hardly what Musil was saying), Kleist's sublime Michael Kohlhaas, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, and now, most preposterous of all, Proust's Swann in Love.

Again and again one is forced to spell out the obvious: The greatness of a work of art lies in, among other things, its idiosyncratic and sovereign use of its medium. Thus a poem cannot be translated with impunity into prose, a novel or a short story cannot be adequately rendered as a movie or a play. The reason for this is not only the difference between the mediums but also the similarity. When Prokofiev makes a splendid opera out of Valery Bryusov's novel The Flaming Angel, the two mediums are so different that the mind is not goaded into making invidious, or any other kinds, of comparisons. Similarly, when Frederick Ashton makes a ballet of Britten's musical setting of some of the poems in Rimbaud's Les Illuminations, the flagrant differences among the three mediums allow all three creators to emerge unscathed. Great talent, to say nothing of genius, also comes in handy. And if a second-rate novel can be improved into a first-rate movie, no hackles will rise. But a masterpiece should be left in peace.

There is just enough similarity and difference between a novel and a film to make one worry constantly about the loss in transit. If film were an entirely visual medium, the sacrifice of certain words and thoughts could be forgiven; but to the extent that film is also verbal and narrative, we cannot condone the losses incurred in those areas. Significantly, the great filmmakers have tended to avoid adapting major novels to the screen; on the rare occasions when they have let themselves be seduced, as Renoir did with Madame Bovary, they have failed as conspicuously as anybody. (Renoir's film was also chopped up in procrustean editing forced on the director.) Bergman, though he might be thought of as ideal for bringing Ibsen and Strindberg to the screen, has staunchly refrained. But fools rush in, and A la Recherche du temps perdu has elicited much research from dunderheads and two hours of lost time from those attending Swann in Love.

Any number of writers and directors were, at various times, involved in attempts to film Proust, most glaringly Harold Pinter, whose elaborate but failed leap at encapsulating the entire Remembrance of Things Past in a five-hour screenplay has been published for all of us to see and deplore. The very size of the novel should be enough to foredoom any filmization as a whole; only a TV mini-series or maxi-series could cope with such length, but for television Judith Krantz is clearly more appropriate than Proust. Peter Brook was the one who came up with the idea of using part of the novel, specifically the fairly self-contained second section, Un Amour de Swann, and proceeded to write his own screenplay. Several years later his groundwork finished by Jean-Claude Carriere and Marie-Helene Estienne and directed by Schlondorff reaches us as Swann in Love. Although it ends with Swann in the grips of a terminal disease, it should put to rest the legend of the sweet-sad song of the dying swan.

The idea here was to compress the roughly 250 pages of this section into the span of a single day, complete with flashbacks and a flash-forwardlike epilogue, as well as, to the utter confusion of non-Proustians, a few references to material from other sections of the novel. The compression promptly violates the essence of Proust's novel, whose protagonist is time: how time changes situations, perceptions, people; or how change is revealed in time as a mere variation on sameness; or how memory strives heroically, and in some cases successfully, to countervail the erosions of time. But this cannot be achieved within the narrow framework of a single day, no matter how many holes are punched in it by flashbacks. The second violation was to make Swann the narrator of these events as he records them in his diary. This is doubly wrong. The scrupulous, or unscrupulous, scrutiny to which Swann is to be subjected can come only from an outside observer; in the novel, this is the narrator, Marcel. Swann's essence is subjectivity and can be studied only from an at least potentially objective point of view. Swann's pathos is the waste of his talents on becoming an art advisor to trivial aristocrats and his obsession with Odette. If he keeps a diary, he becomes the rival of Proust in creating a substantial, perdurable chronicle. He is no longer pathetic.

Yet the ultimate difference is in the style and imagery of the book, its elaborate, fine-spun, gossamer yet also sinewy sentences, ranging from the extended metaphor to the pregnant maxim. The book is full of asides and speculations, apophthegms and evocative tropes, analyses of works of art and human psyches, and their reticulate interactions. The film can find no analogues for this, and substitutes mere visual opulence to glide over on its way from story point to story point. An invented scene shows a scarcely undressed Swann in a brothel having casual intercourse from the rear with a whore whom he is interrogating all the while about Odette's past and present; this is totally alien to Proust and somewhat removed from minimal decorum. In fact, as Roger Shattuck remarked to me privately but did not say in his thoughtful critique of the film in The New York Review of Books, two things never spelled out in Proust--heterosexual sex and money-- are made much of in the movie and thus deleteriously demystified. We see, for instance, Swann stuffing bills for Odette into a fancy box on the mantelpiece. Crude stuff, but even cruder is the totally invented ending in which a man tells a companion as Odette, now Mme. Swann, goes by that her fee in the old days was five hundred francs. However bad business it is to translate a masterpiece into another medium, the cheapness of the translators can make it worse.

Add to this the absurdity of Jeremy Irons as Swann. Granted the script robs the character of his complexity, there still could be more to this Swann than a sort of cadaverous languor and fuzzy condescension. And for the moments of high passion, Irons merely converts the sound track into a pant track. There is no sense here of exquisite connoisseurship, of that desperate refinement that is to serve the non-Aryan outsider as entree into high society. Worse yet, though in France a French voice has been dubbed into Irons's mouth, elsewhere we get Irons's own voice spouting Berlitz-crash-course French. A heavy English accent makes no sense at all from Swann. Ornella Muti does have the chatoyant quality of Proust's Odette, of shuttling vertiginously between beauty and coarseness, but she does not have the acting ability, or just the temperament or mystery, to make Swann's thralldom dramatically believable. Alain Delon, looking not a whit like Proust's Baron de Charlus, gives a primitive rendition of an aging queen, and Fanny Ardant, untalented and unappealing, reverses Proust's scheme and turns the Duchesse de Guermantes into Mme. Verdurin.

Conversely, Marie-Christine Barrault is a persuasive Mme. Verdurin, keeping the vulgarity convivial and controlled, and Jacques Boudet renders the shallow snobbery of the Duc de Guermantes with an elegant economy of means. Sven Nykvist, although his cinematography doesn't stun me as it used to, does handsomely by the excellent sets of that old hand Jacques Saulnier and the opulent costumes of Yvonne Sassinot de Nesle, a new name to me. What is quite wrong is Hans Werner Henze's music. A modernist composer whose early work had genuine merit, Henze doesn't even try to recapture in Vinteuil's music the spirit of Franck and Faure, and provides instead something as unpleasing as it is anachronistic.

A few scenes do work: dinner at the Verdurins', a jealous lover's nocturnal prowls, details of such humdrum activities as dressing and shaving. But should Proust come to this? Some scenes are downright offensive, such as the aforementioned bordello sequence or a lunch at a fancy restaurant in the Bois to which the lecherous Charlus has invited a penniless young writer. This invented character rings false in every respect, including looks. But the falsest note is the continuous reduction of complexity to simplicity, of saying less with a 110-minute movie than Proust does with a paragraph.

The customary argument for such a filmization, when all else fails, is that it sends new readers to the novel. But I wonder how many readers who need such a near-trashy movie to direct them to Proust would stay with him for more than a few pages, and how much, even if they read on, these flaneurs get from the book? Indeed, I wonder how much moviegoers not already familiar with the novel can make of the film--how, for example, they can deduce the Jupien business from a few scratches on Charlus's face? And for the sake of a few dubious converts, is it worth offending the faithful and desecrating the shrine? Is there salvation through sacrilege?