One of the most useless intellectual exercises, in my opinion, is to compare a book and a movie, even if the movie is inspired by the book or is an adaptation. Literature and cinema are as different arts as dance and painting, for example. Each has its specific materials and means of expression, and comparing two works from different arts, even if they approach the same theme, seems ridiculous to me. ‘Un amour de Swann‘, the 1984 film by Volker Schlöndorff starts from the characters and plots described in the first volumes of the monumental series of novels ‘In search of lost time’ by Marcel Proust. If nothing else, at least the complexity of the Proustian text should be sufficient as an argument to avoid comparisons. ‘Un amour de Swann’ is a period film, adapted for the screen by Volker Schlöndorff, with a screenplay written by Peter Brook among others, which uses characters and settings from Proust’s novels and partly rewrites, for the screen, one of the many story lines in the books. It is a story of obsessive love, of social conventions, of feelings confessed in manners dictated by the social rules and the etiquette of a world that was in its twilight, but was not aware of it. It’s a film that deserves to be judged as a stand-alone work.
Charles Swann, the hero of the film, is a rich bourgeois living in the last decades of the 19th century. He is rich enough to afford to do nothing, to maintain a not very spacious apartment but with an appearance and agglomeration of objects of a museum in Paris, a personal servant and a two-horse carriage. He has access to a high society that is a mixture of bourgeoisie and nobility, although the Jewish origin of his family is not forgotten by those around him. He has all the time in the world to occupy himself and describe in a private diary his own feelings, the center of his self-centered universe. When his best friend introduces him to Odette, a luxury courtesan, falling in love with her puts him in front of difficult dilemmas. First of all, he is terribly jealous and needs to come to terms with the woman’s feelings and his own. Then, he must decide whether to formalize the relationship through marriage. A second social barrier created by his marriage to a former courtesan risks isolating him from the circles of high society in which he revolves. Everything will be played out and decided in one day and especially one night.
Volker Schlöndorff succeeds in recreating on screen the atmosphere of 19th century Parisian finery, with its decadent sophistication, with its masked social prejudices, with its feelings dressed like the characters in corsets and layers of sophisticated fabrics. Every now and then we have, for a fraction of a second, clues to the cruelty of the real world around the heroes: a silhouette in rags on the streets on which the carriages gallop, a look or a word that alludes to the contradictions, exploitation of women, anti-Semitism or homophobia that gnawed at the social edifice that it would collapse at the outbreak of the Great War. The characters, however, are narcissistically concerned with their own feelings, and the conflicts are drowned in the loaded aestheticism of the settings and self-concerns of the big bourgeoisie. Jeremy Irons is the ideal actor for the role of Swann, bringing to the screen a passion that is intended rather unsuccessfully to be controlled by social conventions. Ornella Muti is the beautiful and mysterious Odette, and each of the viewers will have to decide, like Swann, what her true feelings are. Alain Delon is counter-cast as the Baron de Charlus, a rather unusual role for his filmography, but further evidence, in my opinion, that he was a much more complex actor than the one known from his very commercial films. Fanny Ardant is also on screen in the role of the Duchesse de Guermantes, reduced in importance in the story, so that we do not have much opportunity to enjoy her formidable talent. The finale puts events into perspective and concludes a solid, well-acted period film that I greatly enjoyed and that will only disappoint those who insist on making comparisons. For Volker Schlöndorff this film is, I think, another study of a decaying society, one of the main themes of his filmography.