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PARTISAN REVIEW
How can one convey this first-person absence in a film wh ere all
personages are shown in the fl esh ?
In
The Lady in the Lake
(1946)
Robert Montgomery made the camera represent the protagoni st; he
appears only when refl ected in a mirror.
Th e Search
might h ave offered
the opportunity to try that devi ce aga in in spite of its awkwa rdn ess.
Pinter and his coll abora tors did the safe and probabl y the ri ght
thing in staying with the tradition of the obj ective camera. They
acknowl edge Proust's subj ective point of vi ew in two ways. First, with
few exceptions, Marcel remains a p assive protagonist. He seems to do
nothing but he wa tch es everything. Whereas everyone else is a charac–
ter in high reli ef, Marcel merel y witnesses wh at goes on. Secondl y,
Pinter has dramati call y modified the form of the story so th at we begin
at the end, not in an unspecified middl e as Proust does . That way,
Pinter tell s us that the events have already taken pl ace· and tha t, as we
go through them, the narrator may intersperse shots and sequences that
do not belong to Marcel's sequenti al experience.
It
leads to a very
compl ex yet effective flow of interwoven, rhymed, and associated
textures that both chall enge and suppo rt the narra tive line. Pinter
seems to offer this cross- cut technique as a loose transl a tion of " invol–
untary memory." These . two tran spositions of Proust's fi ctional
universe approach very close to the fronti ers of cinema ti c art, some–
times ri sking boredom o r in coherence. Yet
I
beli eve the story consti–
tutes a beautifull y appropria te context for experiments tha t have been
tri ed by Eisenstein, Bergman , and the French n ew wave.
Despite the mnemoni c embroidery, Pinter's screenpl ay foll ows a
basic outline. He miniaturizes
The Search
in eight parts.
I. We begin with a yellow screen plu s the sound of a bell. Cut
to
a
kaleidoscopic sequence of sho ts that previ ew scenes to come and slowl y
locate a middl e-aged man moving through a grotesque recepti on of old
peopl e. The yellow mo tif is sh own to belong to a pa tch of color in
Vermeer's
Vi ew of Delft.
2. A somewha t compli ca ted exposition presents Marcel' s
drame
du coucher
in Combray and the boy's di stant rela tio nship to the
Duchesse de Guermantes and to Swann. Swann 's long affair with
Odette fifteen years earli er is presented in a fourteen- shot in sert focused
on jealousy. Marcel, now in hi s teens, spi es on hi s lesbi a n neighbor,
Mil e Vinteuil , watches the amazing steeples of Martinvill e from a
carri age, and (in Pari s) suffers Monsi eur de Morpois' scorn of his
attempts at writing.
3. Marcel (now eighteen ) accompani es hi s grandmo ther to the
seaside resort of Balbec. There he meets Sa int-Loup and CharI us, two
