Swann In Love
Un amour de Swann
Eine Liebe von Swann

This Franco-German co-production comes from New German Cinema director Volker Schlöndorff (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Tin Drum, The Handmaid's Tale). It is based on the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel sequence, In Search of Lost Time, as adapted by legendary theater and film director Peter Brook, who was originally going to make the movie. Harold Pinter would more successfully attempt an adaptation in 2000 with the play Remembrance of Things Past.) The film imagines a day in the life of the aging 19th-century Parisian aristocrat Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons) as he looks back on his past when he was a young, wealthy, eligible bachelor in the finest circles of Belle Époque Paris.

When we think of a Jeremy Irons character, we typically think of a powerful, aristocratic gent who may be up to some shady business. But what the commanding British star of stage and screen really excelled at in his early to mid-career was playing men of that ilk whose elegant exteriors concealed a fragile ego and desperate need to fill a hollow void inside them; guys whose romantic and sexual obsessions almost lead to their downfall but whose privilege or family nearly always saved them. Thus, Irons should be a perfect Charles Swann, but the fact that he's acting outside of his native English, and I don't think the voice used for this French-language film belongs to him, prevents him from making Swann truly compelling. Irons' vocal ability to slip whimpers and wines into his sonorous speech is just as key to his distinctive ability to play these types of men as is his gaunt frame and deep-set eyes.

The most impressive aspect of the picture is the cinematography by Sven Nykvist (Fanny and Alexander, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and countless others). I don't usually get all that excited about directors of photography, but Sven was second only to Gordon Willis as the man who made me start to understand that this craft could really be an art. There are shots of empty rooms in some of the movies Nykvist shot (Richard Attenborough's 1992 Chaplin comes to mind) where lingering on a static image of furniture, walls, and windows with light streaming through them are more dramatic than anything narrative in the movie). Such is the case with Swann in Love.