Time Regained | Trailer | New Release

A new restoration of Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on February 9: Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation—an attempt to condense all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time into a single feature, using the seven-part novel’s last installment as a kind of frame—is also one of his lushest, most transporting reflections on the movies’ power to seize and preserve moments of time. Proust’s narrator, Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella), is a consistent presence in the movie, but Time Regained is dominated by entrancing, sometimes tragic figures that seem to drift in and out of the film’s field of view: Catherine Deneuve as the stately former courtesan Odette de Crecy; Emmanuelle Béart as Marcel’s young love Gilberte; John Malkovich as the closeted, mysterious Baron de Charlus. Ruiz gives special attention to Proust’s fascination with photography and early forms of radio and cinema—technologies that promised a more perfect form of “time r