Cinema
Memories
Peter Ackroyd
Celeste (`AA', Camden Plaza)
The most recent attempt to film A larecherche du temps perdu failed even to get, off the ground, but that was predictable enough: you can hardly divert an ocean into a bottle. The mistake was to confront Proust head-on, and attempt to convert his writing directly into cinematic terms. It _lust won't work: if there is one lesson to he gained from his prose, it lies in the virtues of obliquity — the sideways movement of 3 crab manoeuvring the waves — and of subterfuge. So it is that the German director, Pere; Adlon, has come closer to Proust's meth°`' — and, in fact, closer to the author himself — by dramatising not the novels but the memoirs of Proust's housekeeper, Celeste Albaret. The film wears a mask, as it were' and although its ostensible theme is the relationship between the man and his set" vant, the real subject is Adlon's attempt to create a cinematic method which will, at least in part, depict Proust's own vision °f the world. It begins in a small kitchen where Celeste sits in silence, impassive, waiting for the sound of a bell to summon her to Proust st bedroom where she serves two weak cups 01 coffee each day and administers to his at- tacks of asthma. When they are wrapPed to the smoke of medicinal vapour which Or blows towards him, it is as if they are lost In the same cloud. She sleeps the same hours as he does — from eight in the morning un- til three in the afternoon; she glues together several pages of his manuscript — probably just one sentence — as if she were mending the Ark. She grows more like her employer daily: for the rooms of the flat where they lead 'this hermit life' are permeated by Proust's presence, bathed in a calm, clear light in which Celeste indulges in her own reveries which, concerned as they are with her childhood in the country, are not dissimilar to Proust's own. She does not mind sitting and dreaming the nights away: her employer has taught her the secret of life, And so a strange symbiosis takes place; the woman acquires the characteristics of the man, but she also becomes a character in his internal drama. So powerful is his im- agination that she is drawn ineluctably into It: 'Sometimes I feel 1 am his mother, and sometimes his child'. He lies in his bed, hav- ing constructed a wall of infantilism bet- ween himself and the outside world more solid than the cork with which he has lined his walls; and she protects him from that world which he does not need to see.
The film, in order to evoke this strange and sombre mood, slows reality down. Nothing happens for minutes at a time; one hears a clock ticking, or Proust's coughing In a distant room. The camera follows Celeste's silent movements through empty rooms in one long, fluid shot; certain scenes are extended almost beyond the limit of en- durance. But that, of course, is exactly the Point: by allowing the camera to linger over a restricted set of images, Percy Adlon is following as closely as he can the elaborate contours of Proust's prose. In the same manner, the camera will focus upon one ob- ject — the machine which disinfects 70ust's letters, an antique coffee-maker in an attempt to transform images in the same manner as Proust transformed sensa- tions: you must stare at them, devour them with an unblinking gaze, until they reveal their secrets. As Celeste remembers her nine Years in Proust's household — we see everything from the perspective of the year of his death, 1922 — her memories of the recent past and of her distant childhood interweave with present reality so that life is suspended in the perpetual clarity of `time regained'.
It is an ambitious undertaking, and one by misunderstood; but it is helped here uY the performances of the two central characters. Eva Mattes plays Celeste: she has a placid, resigned face but not without a certain beauty. She combines devotion with a native common sense so that, through her eyes, we see Proust both as a genius and as a monster — the kind of man who can use a Peep-hole in a brothel to see a man being whipped, and who can turn a casual social encounter into a sacred mystery. When he returns from an evening with a princess or a count he waves Celeste eagerly to a chair in °I-der to recount in exact detail what he has seen and what others have said. She was the sYinhol of the reality he needed, but which he kept at a safe distance — the relationship he required in all things was that between Master and servant. Jurgen Arndt has so close a physical resemblance to Proust that I find it difficult now to disentangle his face with the
photographic images of the writer himself. When he is being shaved, his eyes follow the barber everywhere; he preens himself in the mirror and strokes his skin; he wraps a warm towel around his face with an expres- sion of ecstasy; at the moment of death, he stares at Celeste and his eyes grow wider and wider — not, I think, because he is afraid of death but simply because he is ex- periencing a sensation which he has never had before. It is a measure of this film's achievement that it provides a recognisable cinematic metaphor for this, extraordinary imagination.
Previous page
