Swann in Love

One of the reviews jokingly suggested that seeing this movie would allow you to pretend that you had read the novel. I strongly disagree. I suspect that anybody who has not read the novel would find this movie pretty hard to follow and even harder to like. It's probably true that Proust is an essentially unfilmable writer. But, having conceded that, it is surprising how much subtlety and insightful reading is displayed in this movie. I am generally a pretty careful reader, but in watching this movie I had the experience several times of seeing things that I thought were changes from the novel and then, when I went back to the text I found that they were there all along and I had simply missed them.

This is mostly true in Muti's portrayal of Odette, which is not only much more sympathetic, but also much more complex than the view of her I remembered from reading the book. In fact, for me, the subtlety of Muti's performance has opened up a whole new possibility of interpretation of the role in the Proust novel of a character who is normally treated by readers with the same kind of contempt with which she is regarded by many of the novel's characters, including (most of the time) Swann himself.

Now, on the negative side: I found the portrayal of Swann much less successful. The problem is not so much with Jeremy Irons' performance, which more than adequate, but what the screenplay leaves out in his case. Apart from Swann's jealosy and longing, which are fully in evidence here, Swann's character in the novel is presented mainly through his interest in art -- his unfinished writing on Vermeer and, most of all, his very complex responses to music.

Therefore, the treatment -- or, rather, mistreatment -- of music is the most serious failing in this movie. One Amazon.com reviewer said that the music in the movie was by Cesar Franck. I only wish it were so. If that is what he heard, he must have listened to a completely different sound track from the one that I heard. According to the credits, Hans Werner Henze was responsible for the music, and three other contemporary composers are also credited, but Cesar Franck is not mentioned, and the music I heard sounded like a bad imitation of Debussy. But, in addition to the poor quality of the music, the movie is completely unsuccessful in conveying the central importance it has in the novel. And, to make matters worse, when the music is for piano, it is played on pianos that are grotesquely out of tune, as if the director thought that having the pianos out of tune added to the period authenticity of the movie!

Notwithstanding all of that, this is a movie I would gladly watch again. It is thought-provoking and it has one truly great performance -- that of Ornella Muti.