Synopsis
1922On his deathbed, Marcel Proust is looking through photos, rernembering his life. But the real characters mingle with the fictional ones.
And gradually, fiction wins out over reality.
His life's only sense lies in the reality of his work, and his work streams before his eyes. His literary characters people his memories, like a stereoscope projection on the wall of his room, coming to life in die seif-contained world of his small apartment on the Rue Hamelin.
The happy days and lost paradises of his childhood alternate with the more recent memories of his social and literary life. The drama of the war, closely examined from the viewpoint of the small circles of Paris society, is transformed into a vast social comedy. In the spreading twilight, the shape of post-war society looms on the horizon.
Then, everything shatters ... Proust-Ruiz does his utmost to recreate an impossible timelessness, blending the baroque and the surreal. Body language and the reading of signs become the narrator-director's favourite game as reader-viewers look on, astonished, frozen and amused by turn, marionettes jerking in a world of madmen, culminating in the dreadful masquerade of the Ball of Faces. Here, a universal lack of recognition reigns: no-one is in their rightful place. Ghostlier than ever, liquefied in an intangible dimension, the narrator watches these disjointed puppets in disbelief. Almost all the characters from "Remembrance of Things Past" are there: mummified, aggressive, blind, superannuated or unwittingly amusing impostors, vainly attempting to conceal the only truth that hides behind their make-up.
Now it is time to end the tale, so here it all begins for our narrator who decides that true life, the only life truly lived, is literature ...
Far more than an exploration of memory, "Remembrance of Things Past" is the description of a learning process: at the end of a journey of initiation, a narrator realises that he can finally write his work.
