Amour de Swann, Un
France / Germany,
1984, 105 min
Shown in 1984
CREDITS
- dir
-
Volker Schlöndorff
- prod
-
Margaret Menegoz
- scr
-
Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, Marie-Hélène Estienne
- cam
-
Sven Nykvist
- editor
-
Françoise Bonnot
- cast
-
Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti, Alain Delon, Fanny Ardant, Marie-Chrstine Barrault
The dream of filming Marcel Proust’s monumental and elusive literary masterpiece was cherished for 21 years by former actress-turned-producer Nicole Stephane (some may remember her from the Cocteau film, Les Infants Terribles), who acquired all audio-visual rights in 1962 from Proust’s niece. But, time and time again, plans to produce the film failed to materialize as one director after another first agreed to do it, then backed out. Visconti was initially approached and he planned to film Volume Four, “Sodom and Gomorrah,” but died in the initial stages of planning. Next Stephane approached Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter. Pinter wrote a brilliant screenplay, which has been published, but his impressionistic treatment of the major episodes would have been too costly. Louis Malle, Resnais and Truffaut were all subsequently considered but Frenchmen, in particular, were wary of the project. Then Peter Brook wrote a script in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carriere that seemed to solve the problems of a film adaptation. Brook agreed to direct but a major theater project forced him to drop out. Finally, Volker Schlondorff, the German-born, French-trained director whose masterly adaptation of another difficult literary work, Gunther Grass’ The Tin Drum, earned him an Academy Award, agreed to step in. Schlondorff somewhat reworked Peter Brook’s manuscript, but adhered to Brook’s original idea of reducing the time span to 24 hours, focusing on Swann who, Samuel Beckett has pointed out, is the “cornerstone of the entire structure” of Proust’s novel. Thus the towering literary landmark of the 20th century that everyone talks about but few have actually read (at least in its entirety) finally reaches the screen, with some of the most prestigious talents on the international film scene participating in its realization. Jeremy Irons is Charles Swann; French idol Alain Delon, in a daring role change, is Baron De Charlus; Italian beauty Ornella Muti plays Odette de Crecy and French actresses Fanny Ardant and Marie-Christine Barrault interpret the Duchese de Guermantes and Madam Verdurin, respectively. Cinematography is by Sven Nykvist, who shot many of Ingmar Bergman’s works, and the music is by the leading contemporary German composer, Hans-Werner Henze.
—Mel Novikoff
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
