Everyone knows you can’t film Remembrance of Things Past, so
Raúl Ruiz did it. With hindsight–the only kind worth having, as
far as Proust is concerned–I now understand this act of
effrontery and genius as the culmination of Ruiz’s career.  As
if to prepare for this moment, he has given himself many years’
practice poking holes in the conventions of storytelling, trying
to glimpse what might lie beyond those walls. (In a 1982 work,
On Top of the Whale, he even allowed a first-person narrator to
get into a canoe and paddle out of the film, so that the other
characters, and the audience, had to muddle on without
guidance.) Ruiz has also cultivated an appropriate obsession
with the mysteries of language and identity; in the 1996 Three
Lives and Only One Death, for example, different persons take up
residence in the body of Marcello Mastroianni, moving in and out
of his flesh in response to a seemingly random whispering of
words. If the gnosticism of such films was un-Proustian, the
hermeticism was right in the s