Issue seven: María Álvarez, 'Les temps perdu'
People talk about reading Marcel Proust in the same way that they discuss running marathons. His novel In Search of Lost Time is not read, it is ‘done.’ Have you done Proust? Have you done the London Marathon? A language of failure and success brackets the book, of falling at the first volume and elated exhaustion at completing all seven. There are memoirs about reading Proust for a year and highbrow self-helpers explaining how his work can change your life. Because these days no good deed goes unlabelled, and every micro-task offers a path to satori, there is sure to be a New York Times lifestyle article that frames reading Proust as one of those two-word, adjective-driven activities pursued by people who make frequent and joyless use of the word ‘joy’: slow cooking, deep jogging, hard ironing, raw Prousting.
Among any cross-section of Proust readers there will be a Proustbragger keen to make it clear that they’ve done In Search of Lost Time before you and with greater insight. In the documentary Les temps perdu by director María Álvarez, which opened in the US last week at New York’s Film Forum, the Proustbragger is named Alberto and he has read the novel four, going on five, times. He likes to tell the other members of his Proust reading group this fact repeatedly. Alberto also enjoys reminding the club—who have been meeting regularly in a Buenos Aires cafe for 17 years—that it was started by his daughter Albertine, who shares her name with the love interest of the novel’s narrator. It was her mother’s idea to christen her Albertine, not his, he explains. Alberto’s daughter now lives thousands of miles away, in Paris. The distance from her is perhaps what he really wants to talk about, and why Alberto remains a fixture of the group, but his emotions get tangled in his ego.
The Proust club is now comprised of a dozen or so retirees, aged in their 70s and 80s. They read In Search of Lost Time aloud and discuss its themes as they go. Once they have finished, they turn back to the start for another round. (This approach shares affinity with a group of Swiss Finnegan’s Wake enthusiasts documented by Dora García in her 2013 film The Joycean Society, who also loop back to the beginning of their chosen book.) Les temps perdu follows the readers over the course of a few years. Some are regular fixtures who have been part of the group since the early days. Others drift in and out, their attendance waxing and waning with health and other life demands. Everyone clearly enjoys the companionship and draws pleasure from Proust’s work, but it’s unclear whether their friendships extend beyond the novel and the cafe. In one scene, a woman turns up without knowing what the group does. A friend has recommended it to her because she likes being social. It soon dawns on the woman that reading Proust is not her idea of fun, and Álvarez’s camera captures a priceless look of annoyance and incredulity on her face as the club’s workings are explained to her.
Les temps perdu is a film of close-ups, of telling details in a half smile, an eye-roll, a wandering gaze. Save for a couple of breathers—exterior shots, images of the cafe’s proprietor as he goes about his work, interludes from Debussy’s Syrinx—Álvarez keeps us at the table with her subjects. The subject of Les temps perdu is Proust’s work but the frail body is a major theme throughout. Between readings from the novel, Álvarez’s subjects talk about their deafness, osteoporosis, hip replacements and deteriorating sight. One woman recalls her delight at being given a madeleine cake while in hospital, reminding her of literature’s most famous description of being reminded. Another person describes coping with her ageing body as like “trying to talk to an octopus.” A woman named Norma remarks how nice it is that the book allows her to travel to Paris in her imagination. In one comical scene, she complains that she can’t see well enough to read, as a friend, clearly irritated at Norma’s moaning, repeatedly talks over her and insists that she can. Overlapping dialogue and conversations within conversations give Les temps perdu a sparky, Altman-like energy, but what Álvarez is capturing may simply be the effects of the readers’ hearing loss rather than passionate literary debate.
Les temps perdu is the second in a trilogy about art and ageing. It follows Las Cinéphilas, which documents six retired women in Argentina, Spain and Uruguay, who visit the cinema religiously, out of a love of film and as a way to contend with the solitude of old age. (Norma is also one of the subjects of Las Cinéphilas and introduced Álvarez to the reading group.) Inevitably for a film about Proust, there is talk of memory and the passage of time. Meeting in the New Year, they toast to the hope that they will still be around a year later. The group argues whether people’s personalities can change as they age. They talk about love and sex. Stories of divorce and bereavement come up, as does the changing city. One man, a musician who worked at the nearby Teatro Colón opera house, confesses that he finds it hard nowadays to walk through the neighbourhood. And Alberto reminds the group that he’s read Proust four times.
Álvarez maintains a low-key tone. There are no dramatic revelations in Les temps perdu. No tears, no teachable moments about the healing power of great art. Proust’s words are simply given space, and Álvarez allows us to watch the effect of his writing on his readers. In the final scene of the movie, the group reaches the end of the book and after a few cheers and a round of applause they agree to return to the start. Almost immediately, Norma puts her coat on and walks to the cafe door. It is dark outside. On her way out she pauses to ask the group how many years it's now been. Fifteen? Seventeen, comes the reply. “OK, goodbye!” says Norma, and promptly leaves. In its brevity and lack of sentimentality, the scene has a surprising weight. A sense of familiarity with a character grown over the course of the film simply evaporates. This is how we all go; alone and in the time it takes to walk through a door.
A feature of language today is that its gears are stuck in hyperbole, in the aggrandizing urge to declare any old thing to be deeply moving, quietly profound, profoundly necessary, an assault on civilization, and so on. This perma-drama is addictive because it makes us feel that our lifetime is important enough to be carved into history. But it is an exhausting falsehood. Only history is historical. Most of life is humdrum, unremarkable. It is marked by a few memorable incidents, some of which, as Proust points out, accompany us to the end. Have you done In Search of Lost Time? Have you done the London Marathon? OK, goodbye!
RECOMMENDATIONS
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The Paris Review has just brought its 2005 ‘Art of Fiction’ interview with Salman Rushdie out from behind the paywall. He talks about his life, his novels and the fatwa. But Rushdie also includes many gems for writers. “I like the Randall Jarrell line: “A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” I think that’s true. If you’re going to write a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred thousand words, perfection is a fantasy. If you’re Shakespeare and you’re writing sixteen lines, you can create a perfect thing.”
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, has been running a summer-long season devoted to the horror film, organised by Caryn Coleman, Ron Magliozzi, and Brittany Shaw. The section of the series focusing on folk horror has, this week, been burned to death inside a flaming effigy of Alfred Barr, in order to make way for hazmat suits and the season’s eco-horror chapter. In this spirit, here is Murrain, an hour-long TV play written in 1975 by the British science fiction author Nigel Kneale (of the famed Quatermass series). I’ve been haunted by this film since I first saw it about a decade ago, when Strange Attractor Press and New York’s great Colloquium for Unpopular Culture programmed it in a day of screenings and talks devoted to Kneale’s work. (The night after this screening I was buzzed by a UFO, an incident I wrote about in respected magazine of the paranormal, Frieze.) Superficially, Murrain is folk horror—the story concerns an elderly woman who lives on the edge of a modern rural community and is suspected of witchcraft—but it’s more complex than that, an exploration of ignorance, loneliness, and ambiguity. Here hex, here.
The other day I had a conversation with a friend about acid house and on the way down into the rabbit hole, I was reminded of this 1987 classic by Phuture. Sticking with the horror theme, has there ever been a more frightening opening line to a song than a stentorian electronic voice barking: “This is cocaine speaking. I can make you do anything for me”? I’ll just have a coffee, thanks.