Un Amour de Swann

IN THE WORKS

For some twenty years Nicole Stephane has dreamed of bringing Proust to the screen, and at last Un Amour de Swann is in production in Paris. Peter Brook has collaborated with Marie-Hélène Estienne and Jean-Claude Carrière on the witty and elegant screenplay. Jeremy Irons, seen here in two different scenes, plays the restless, obsessive Swann. Below, he speaks with the Duchesse de Guermantes, played by Fanny Ardant. Alain Delon, right, adjusting his mustache, plays that fin-de-siècle decadent the Baron de Charlus. Inset, upper left, is Ornella Muti as the infinitely desirable, but too attainable, Odette. The film follows their story in brief scenes taking place over a period of twenty-four hours. By means of the quick succession of impressions, the rapid displacement of each scene by the next, the resistance to conventional continuity, the film endeavors to parallel the structure that is the aesthetic principle and novelistic triumph of Proust’s work. Volker Schlondorff, known for his cinematic adaptations of novels, is the director.

Can it be done? Can Schlondorff recapture the past? And how good is Mr. Irons’s French accent?