Swann in Love
by Volker Schlöndorff
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Actor: Alain Delon, Fanny Ardant, Jeremy Irons, Marie-Christine Barrault, Ornella MutiDirector: Volker Schlöndorff
Writer: Volker Schlöndorff
Producer: Eberhard Junkersdorf
Producer: Margaret Ménégoz
Writer: Jean-Claude Carrière
Writer: Marcel Proust
Writer: Marie-Hélène Estienne
Writer: Peter Brook
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog; French (Original Language); German (Original Language)
Format: Color, NTSC
Running Time: 110 minutes
Release Date: 1992-07-24
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Xenon Entertainment
Studio: Xenon Entertainment
VHS Movie Reviews of Swann in Love
Movie Review: Amazon.com review is factually wrong
Summary: 3 Stars
Marshall Fine doesn't know what he's talking about: Swann is not a French aristocrat. He may have money but he's a perpetual outsider in fin-de-siècle Paris because he's Jewish. The film itself is visually stunning, but because Jeremy Irons is dubbed, it feels fake at its core. Movie Review: Mrshall Fine's comments are insulting and stupid
Summary: 3 Stars
It's unbelievable that Amazon would sanction Marshall Fine's comments. In fact, there are thousands of serious readers who have read Proust's work. There is an online Proust discussion group with hundreds of members who have read In Search of Lost Time several times, both in the original French and in a number of recent translations. Mr. Fine's characterization of reading of Proust as something that needs to be faked tells us a lot about his failings, but sadly it also tells us something about Amazon.
As for Volker Schlondorff's film, it's adequate. Jeremy Irons is the visual embodiment of Swann (the French dubbing doesn't really help), which is about all we really need to know, although Raul Ruiz's Time Regained is a more ambitious and satisfying work.
Movie Review: gorgeous for the eyes, not so for the ears
Summary: 3 Stars
I loved the look of this film. The interiors of the mansions are gorgeous. The antiques are impressive. The women's costumes are fabulous. Jeremy Irons looks like Swann as I imagine him, and Alain Delon is perfect as the decadent Charlus. Notice how when we first see him, he is eyeing the footmen at the salon gathering, not just eyeing them, but seeming to drink them in like a thirsty pilgrim in the desert.
I didn't like the disembodied voices that we get because of the dubbing. And I didn't like the music. They should have used real music from the era, the music that Proust himself would have heard. Henze is not a favorite composer of mine, and his work here reinforces the dislike.
And speaking of music, I am going to nitpick on what is probably a very trivial point, and I might even be wrong about this, but I remember reading "Swann in Love" in college, and... as an opera queen... I loved the detail that Odette was going to (pardon me, but I can't get the accent marks to work) the Opera-Comique with the Verdurins to see Victor Masse's "Une Nuit de Cleopatra," and Swann was dismayed because both the Masse opera and the Opera-Comique venue were just too low-brow for his refined taste. In this film, it looks like the opera is being performed at L'Opera, which is a totally different matter. Swann would have approved of their going to the higher-class L'Opera. Since detail of society happenings is so important in the Proust novel, it wouldn't have hurt to have had accurate detail in the film version thereof. Once this film was over, all I could think of was how this project would have been more satisfying as a 12-part series for Masterpiece Theatre.
Movie Review: How it could have looked like
Summary: 4 Stars
Let's get what's bad out of the way.
There's no point in whining about what Schloendorff got wrong in his adaptation, or what he left out. For instance I didn't much like how the famous last line of "Swann in Love" was rendered ("To think I've wasted the best years of my life..." etc.). But let's face it: you can't take a two-million-plus word novel and turn it into a movie without losing _something_. Just accept it.
My other gripe is that neither of the two lead characters say their own lines. Jeremy Irons (English) and Ornella Muti (Italian) are dubbed by French actors. Most Europeans would have seen a dubbed version anyway given how unpopular subtitles are in Europe. To a non-European, it's silly to have a movie dubbed even in the original language, but I suppose it's part and parcel with the European Union's subsidized financing of culture.
That aside, the adaptation is far from being all bad.
Alain Delon as Charlus is especially good. Despite being dubbed, Jeremy Irons looks spot on as Charles Swann. He's got the right balance of haughty manliness and effeminate aristocratic French charm. Ornella Muti is lovely as the cocotte Odette, except that I was disappointed for personal reasons. I saw Muti in a later film, where she was breathtakingly stunning as housewife to a French lawyer ("Un Couple Epatant"). As beautiful as she was at 28, she was ten times more beautiful twenty years later at 48.
As a period piece, the film shines. Swann's tuxedos, the Guermante's Salon, the stone paved streets, the horse drawn carriages, the lady's dresses.
Much of the dialog is lifted straight out of Proust, almost word for word although the context is sometimes changed. For example, Swann is gathering information on Odette from a prostitute who relates how she has seen Odette with another woman in Nice. In the book, the prostitute's words are actually taken from a letter by a servant taking the testimony of a laundry girl for the narrator of a later book in the series who is investigating his own lover, Albertine, some twenty years later.
Schloendorff's film is a dreamy rendition worth seeing on its own, and if fans of the book lower their expectations, the film is a masterful visualization of Proust's "monde".
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
Movie Review: An intense love story
Summary: 4 Stars
Obsessive love is the theme of this movie, based on the book by Proust (SWANN's WAY). Set among the idle rich in 1890's Paris, Jewish aristocrat Swann (Jeremy Irons) is in love with courtesan Odette (Ornella Muti), who is obviously beneath him in station. Racked by jealousies and fears of not being able to win her (probably most who have ever been madly in love with someone who didn't quite love back at the same intensity can relate to this), one wonders if his agonies are worth it: even if Odette decides to marry him it's doubtful she'll ever remain faithful. Like ULYSSES, its near-contemporary classic by Joyce, it's almost an impossible novel to adapt to the screen, though director Volker Schlondorff does a credible job. Beautifully photographed, the movie is an eyeful of aristocratic France; the musical score adds much to the flavor. As to be expected, feelings and nuances predominate.
Summary of Swann in Love
Everybody talks about reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, but do you know anyone who actually has? Here's a way to fake it: this film from Volker Schlöndorff dramatizes one section of the ponderous novel, casting Jeremy Irons as a French aristocrat who makes himself something of a laughingstock with his obsessive pursuit of a faithless courtesan (or is that redundant) played by Ornella Muti. Some may find it slow going, but the film moves a lot faster than the book. And there is a certain hypnotic appeal to it, enhanced by Sven Nykvist's lush cinematography. Besides, is there an actor in movies today who can convey more emotional agony in a single longing look than Irons? --Marshall FineGeneral Video
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