Marcel Proust

Paris, sum­mer 2020. Actors from “la Comédie-Française”, France’s most pres­ti­gious the­ater, rehearse Christophe Hon­oré’s new play, an adap­ta­tion of Mar­cel Proust’s “The Guer­mantes Way”. When the show is sud­den­ly can­celed, the dra­ma group decides to go ahead with it any­way, in the name of art and for the joy of act­ing together.

Arian lives in Simon's large parisian appartment. He wants to know everything from her, follows her, has her accompanied for her trips and constantly interrogates her. Knowing her taste for women and her double life only exacerbates his suffering, his helplessness and his desire for her.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is on his deathbed. Looking at photographs brings memories of his childhood, his youth, his lovers, and the way the Great War put an end to a stratum of society. His memories are in no particular order, they move back and forth in time. Marcel at various ages interacts with Odette, with the beautiful Gilberte and her doomed husband, with the pleasure-seeking Baron de Charlus, with Marcel's lover Albertine, and with others; present also in memory are Marcel's beloved mother and grandmother. It seems as if to live is to remember and to capture memories is to create a work of great art. The memories parallel the final volume of Proust's novel.

The beginning of the 20th century. Charles Swann, a young and wealthy dandy, spends most of his time hanging out with the old nobility, notably the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes. He is madly in love with a pretty demi-mondaine, Odette de Crécy. Idle, Swann surrendered complacently to the torments of jealousy. After hours of suffering, he manages to spend a night with Odette. In the morning, he believes that ultimately, this one is "not his type". However, we find him, many years later, alongside Odette who, now his wife, gave him a daughter. In the company of Baron de Charlus, brother of the Duchess of Guermantes, he wonders about the failure of his sentimental life, so far removed from this absolute he dreamed of...

This is an experimental film featuring an allegorical audiovisual symphony of image, text (excerpts from works by Proust and verses from Rilke’s poetry) and music through the use of archival photographs taken from Illustration Magazine. It focuses on the urban establishment and links the wave of Western colonization to the period right before the Great War (1914-1918).

The only known film footage of Marcel Proust (identified by Canadian professor Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan) shows the French writer at a wedding as he descends a staircase unaccompanied, speedily walking past the slower couples to his right.