Director Volker Schlöndorff (The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum, The Tin Drum) was having dinner with his regular screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and writer-director Peter Brook when Brook casually mentioned that he'd done an adaptation of a section of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (or as it was published in English "A Remembrance of Things Past") and had sufficiently "cracked it" to make a screenplay in the spirit of the novel, but, owing to a busy schedule, couldn't find the time to direct it (as was his intention) and that the producers were looking for a replacement.
"A terrific excitement gripped me..." the director recalled. "'I am available,' I said half-jokingly without thinking it over." Schlöndorff had read the Proust novel when he was seventeen at his boarding school. "Proust revealed three worlds to me: the French language, the corresponding society and the unknown regions of love and jealousy." And the memory of the book was so vivid, he did not go back and re-read it, merely using Brook's script as a template, to recreate the world of La Belle Époque, with a lushness and luxuriousness that recalled the work of Luchino Visconti (who'd tried to make a version of it in 1969) ably helped by the cinematography of Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist.
Jeremy Irons plays Charles Swann, a well-to-do bon vivant in Paris, accepted in most social circles despite being Jewish. He is a habitue of the most fashionable salons of Paris and, if looked on with suspicion by most of the husbands, is positively cooed over by their wives, particularly the Duchesse de Guermantes (Fanny Ardant) and Madame Verdurin (Marie-Christine Barrault), the latter of whom has suggested that Swann might have an interest in a courtesan, Odette de Cracy (Ornella Muti), to whom he is introduced by his friend, the Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon, in a role that he plays floridly and rather heroically—he's the most fun I've ever seen him).
Their meeting does not initially go well, but over the course of lunch Swann becomes smitten and then obsessed with Odette, his thoughts becoming consumed by her. Especially when she doesn't make herself available to him. His days are spent trying to find out details about her—who her male companions might have been, if she's ever slept with women—personal details the knowledge of which might put him off, but having no desire to not possess her completely. This might cost him—prestige, respect, Odette would never be accepted in the society he enjoys—but, although warned, he loses control of his perceived dignity for this one woman.
"Why do I subject myself to such humiliation?" he muses at one point. "I used to think Odette was
ugly! I had to fall in love with her because she reminded me of a
Botticelli. Now I've decided to fall out of love with her and I can't. I
can't. I can't. I can't! Tonight - tonight, I finally understand that
her love for me - which I rejected at first - that the feelings she had
for me will never be revived. But without her I will cease to exist.
It's an illness that could prove fatal. And yet I'm afraid of being
cured." And, later, "My
love for Odette goes beyond physical desire. It is so caught up in my
actions, my thoughts, my sleep, my life, that without it I'd cease to
exist...My love is an illness that has reached the stage where it cannot be
removed without destroying me. As surgeons say, it's inoperable."
Wow. Tough words. A brutal self-assessment. And Swann will risk everything—his friends, his status, his dignity—for her. Even when Madame Verdurin attempts to insert a rival between him and Odette, Swann will not be deterred, going so far as to spend the night in Paris trying to find her, trying to find out out anything about the time away from him—actions that even Swann's lowly carriage driver thinks are beneath him—until he can win her over, something that she already desires. "You fear affection? How odd." she says to him at one point. "That's all I look for. I'd give my soul to find it."
And, in a way, she does. There is compromise for comfort, and Swann certainly provides affection, obsessively so, but she loses her own autonomy in that particular bargain (hardly something that is out of the ordinary in any society, much less 19th Century France). Swann, who spends way too much time in his own head, is left, toward the end of his life, to contemplate the mystery of what has become of him, with his usual brutality: "To think that I wasted years of my life - that I wanted to die - that
the love of my life - was a woman I didn't like - who wasn't my type."
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