Time Regained movie review & film summary (2000)

I walk out of the Illini Union and down Green Street, past the Co-Ed Theater, which is gone, where my father took me to get Cleo Moore's autograph, and past the Capital, which is gone, where I drank beer with Larry Woiwode before he became a novelist, and past the Turk's Head, which is gone, where Simon told me who Samuel Johnson was, and the Book Nook downstairs, which is gone, where I bought Boswell's Life of Johnson. All gone.

The movie opens with an old man in bed (Marcello Mazzarella) being brought tea by his maid. He looks through photographs, which trigger memories, as the furniture in the room rearranges itself for other times. The movie circles the memories. We meet the women who once so captivated him. Here is Gilberte (Emmanuelle Beart). He did not love her so much as learn from her that he could love. Here is her mother, Odette (Catherine Deneuve). And Albertine (Chiara Mastroianni), another more troublesome love; in real life Mastroianni is Deneuve's daughter, and the resemblance suggests Albertine's subterranean connection with Odette . . . and her mother. What does it mean? The photographs evoke but do not explain.

Here is Gilberte's eventual husband, Robert de Saint-Loup (Pascal Greggory). He is composed, intact, as a younger man, but then he goes into the trench warfare of World War I, and when he returns he is crazed by his memories, and talks while shoveling food into his mouth like an animal who wants to eat before larger animals steal his kill. And here is Baron de Charlus (John Malkovich), who plays the role of the slightly elevated, bemused observer--a man like the man we all have in our lives, who seems to stand outside and have a wider view. In my high school that was David Ogden Stiers. Yes, the actor who played Winchester on "MASH." He has never attended a reunion, but is discussed every 10 years by the rest of us, who recall in wonder that he always talked like that. He came to Urbana from Peoria. Where did he learn to talk like Winchester? Tall, confident and twinkling, he would ask, "And what have we here?" "Time Regained" does not tell a story, and you will be disappointed if you go looking for one. It does not contain anything like all of Remembrance of Things Past, because the novel is too vast to be contained in a film. It is not about memories but memory. Yours, mine, Proust's. Memory makes us human. Without it, we would live trapped inside the moving dot of time as it slides through our lives. But to remember the past is to experience its loss. Never again will Blackie come with me on my paper route. The Courier is not published anymore. The cigarettes killed my parents. High school reunions really take it out of you.