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n049  1239  13 Sep 84
BC-REVIEW-''SWANN''
(Newhouse 005)
Film review, for use when ''Swann in Love'' opens at local theaters
BY RICHARD FREEDMAN
Newhouse News Service
    (UNDATED) They said it couldn't be done, and as usual, they were
right.
    Many directors have toyed - unsuccessfully - with the idea of
bringing Marcel Proust's immense, profound, seven-novel masterpiece
''Remembrance of Things Past'' to the screen.
    Now German director Volker Schloendorff (''The Tin Drum'') actually
has filmed a tiny portion of the work, ''Swann in Love,'' with only
middling results. He has given us a visually sumptuous but
essentially sterile rendering of the Proustian world of love and
jealousy against the background of a crumbling society.
    Perhaps the most artistically daring thing is that in addition to a
German director, it boasts an English hero and an Italian heroine in
the crucial roles of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy.
    Otherwise, this is a pretty straight-forward rendering of the
novella-within-a-novel that deals with the obsessive love of rich,
dilettante Jewish stockbroker Swann (Jeremy Irons) for the beautiful
but essentially vapid Odette (Ornella Muti).
    The setting is Paris in 1885, and director Schloendorff has lavished
on his film a sense of period and place that all but buries the
protagonists in its loving care for detail.
    But to render ''Swann in Love'' as a period piece is to miss the
point.
    Swann first encounters Odette at the glided salon of Mme. Verdurin
(Marie-Christine Barrault) whose ''little clan'' of middle-class
admirers are socially several cuts below the world Swann usually
inhabits - that of the aristocratic Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon)
and the Duchesse de Guermantes (Fanny Ardant).
    Gradually, though, Swann finds himself increasingly immersed in the
vulgar Verdurin world in order to be near Odette. An experienced
courtesan, she alternately flirts with and rebuffs the smitten Swann
until she gets him to marry her - a woman, he ruefully reflects, who
isn't even his ''type.''
    The vacuously beautiful Ornella Muti makes a perfect Odette. The
trouble with ''Swann in Love'' (apart from the sheer impossibility of
getting even a tithe of Proust's richness on screen) lies in Jeremy
Irons.
    Accomplished though the actor is, he's generally at a loss to do
more than pout handsomely by way of suggesting the complexity of
Swann's character and motivation.
    So that watching this ''Swann in Love'' is like watching a set of
beautifully dressed department store mannequins go through the
motions of some Proustian charade, rather than the living, breathing,
suffering creations of his great literature.
    X X X
    FILM CLIP:
    ''SWANN IN LOVE.'' Heavy on period decor, but light on inner
psychological and social insight, this is an honorable - but
ultimately inadequate - attempt by director Volker Schloendorff to
grapple with the immensities of Marcel Proust's ''Remembrance of
Things Past.'' Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti star as the obsessed
lovers. Rated R. Two and a half stars.
RW END FREEDMAN
(DISTRIBUTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE)
    
nyt-09-13-84 1533edt
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n070  1553  13 Sep 84
BC-MOVIE-REVIEW-SWANN Undated 2takes
'Swann in Love'
By VINCENT CANBY
c.1984 N.Y. Times News Service
    ''Swann In Love'' is Volker Schlondorff's small, prettily decorated,
unrevealing fragment lifted - gently and with all due respect - from
Marcel Proust's monumental, seven-volume ''Remembrance of Things
Past.''
    It's as if someone had decided to copy and then recreate one of the
great rooms of the chateau at Blois on the scale of a suburban,
split-level ranch house. One remains more impressed by the
eccentricity of the desire than by the result: a room that stands by
itself without particular function and unrelated to any landscape.
    ''Remembrance of Things Past'' is a literary work whose sheer length
and multitude of characters tend to make it seem far more
intimidating than it becomes, once one has made the big plunge into
it. Then, suddenly, the reader, especially the reader of Terence
Kilmartin's fine variation on C.K. Scott Moncrieff's original English
translation, is plunged into an astonishingly vivid, enveloping world
of the imagination - a reconstruction of life in the haute monde of
Paris, as Proust knew it or thought it to be, from the 1880s through
World War I.
    ''Swann in Love,'' taken mostly from Proust's first two volumes,
''Swann's Way'' and ''Within a Budding Grove,'' supplemented by bits
and pieces of later volumes, is the story of the tormented love of
Charles Swann, a very rich member of the upper bourgeoisie and one of
the few Jews to be accepted into the high society of Paris in the
1880s, for a beautiful courtesan, Odette de Crecy.
    In his obsessive passion, Swann sees in Odette the qualities he
admires in the female figures in paintings by the masters. She is
innocent, mysterious, surprising and, perhaps most important,
something to be owned and, once safely possessed, something no longer
to be tormented by.
    Unknown to Charles, Odette is far simpler and less mysterious than
he gives her credit for being. Essentially she's a good-hearted,
ambitious, uncomplicated, professional woman, who loves Charles as
much as she can love anybody, which is more than he will ever believe.
    In ''Swann in Love,'' adapted by Schlondorff from a screenplay by
Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carriere and Marie-Helene Estienne,
Schlondorff attempts to tell the story of Swann and Odette within the
frame of a single day in the life of the now aged, terminally ill
Charles. In the span of this one day, Charles goes about Paris,
attending salons and dinner parties, remembering, in splintery
flashbacks, the events of his courtship of Odette.
    As Charles pursues Odette in his memories, he is aware of being
blinded by jealousy and love, while also not even liking her very
much. He is humorless when she is gay, tired and without interest
when she is responsive. Always he wants to know - and to forgive -
everything about her other affairs, with women as well as with men.
He overwhelms her and frightens her until, at last, almost as an
anticlimax, he marries her.
    The French-language film, with the English Jeremy Irons as Swann and
the Italian Ornella Muti as Odette, has been attractively cast.
However, in spite of all Schlondorff's efforts to make a movie that
stands on its own, one that demonstrates its own style, it can never
escape the sense that it's some sort of mad supersynopsis.
    In addition to Irons and Miss Muti, a number of major performers
have been cast in tiny supporting roles, which, considering the small
scale of the film, can never be as complex as the originals, or even
as complex and interesting as the actors themselves. They're without
any dramatic dimension whatever.
    Alain Delon, made up to look like either Alphonse or Gaston in a
music-hall sketch, appears as the Baron de Charlus, the witty,
womanizing esthete who, as a younger man, introduced Charles to
Odette and, in the later novels, became the notorious homosexual
whose reputation is probably known even to people who've never looked
into ''Remembrance.''
    At no point is Delon allowed to play the baron as the sort of person
who might have been the boon companion to a man of Swann's fastidious
tastes. Instead, all we see is whe Charlus who powders his cheeks,
wickedly eyes pretty young footmen and is rude to poor boys who
resist his advances.
    Marie-Christine Barrault plays Madame Verdurin, the rich,
domineering salon hostess, who at first pushes Swann's cause with
Odette and then, when she realizes he will never be one of her
''faithful,'' attempts to block it. Miss Barrault is fine in her few,
brief scenes, but there's virtually no characterization. There can't
be. There's certainly no suggestion of the irony to come when, at
last, she becomes the Princesse de Guermantes, leader of that circle
she'd always scoffed at as ''the bores.''
    Also wasted are both Fanny Ardant and the role she plays, that of
the Duchesse de Guermantes, whose great fondness for Charles Swann
still doesn't prevent her from warning him that if he marries ''that
creature,'' Odette will never be received in her drawing room or that
of anyone else in society.
     Irons is on his way to becoming a great romantic actor, on stage as
well as screen, but in ''Swann in Love,'' he behaves as if
tranquillized. His anxiety looks extremely handsome, but also vacant.
Miss Muti comes off better. There is just the slightest touch of the
common in her beauty, the merest trace of the ordinary in her manner,
both of which reflect the essential nature of the woman Charles loves
without ever really knowing.
    The physical production is all that money and the photography by
Sven Nykvist can attain. However, the original music, by Hans Werner
Henze, which includes the sonata containing ''the little phrase''
that is the ''national anthem'' of the love of Charles and Odette,
suggests no period or place whatever. The director's decision to rely
on original music - music to which the movie audience can have no
conditioned feelings - was a bold one that doesn't work.
     Schlondorff has made some very creditable adaptations of literary
works, especially ''Young Torless'' and ''The Tin Drum,'' but this
film is beyond him. Of all the classic or difficult novels that have
been turned into movies this year, including the excellent
Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala adaptation of Henry James's ''Bostonians,''
''Swann in Love'' is the most difficult and the least satisfactory. I
suspect that it's not even interesting enough to persuade people to
search out the original. If you haven't read ''Remembrance of Things
Past,'' it doesn't make a great deal of sense, but, if you have, it
doesn't make enough.
    
nyt-09-14-84 0324edt
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