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more members of the noble Guermantes family, and Albertine, an
attractive and elusive young woman of uncertain origins. He tries
unsuccessfull y to kiss her.
4. In a lengthy section set in Paris, Marcel makes his entry into
fashionable society through the Guermantes clan and discovers Char–
Ius ' homosexuality. His grandmother dies. Marcel cannot forget
Albertine, who now virtually offers herself to him.
5. Back in Balbec, this time with his mother, Marcel is consumed
by jealousy over Albertine's real or imagined lesbian relations. They
attend dinners together where the rich hostess, Madame Verdurin, has
Charlus bring a talented young violinist named Morel.
6. Albertine moves into Marcel's apartment in Paris. But his
jealousy becomes all the stronger every time she goes out; he cannot
work. Without her he goes to a concert by Morel at Madame Verdurin's
Paris house. The music is exquisite, yet it is the occasion for the
dramatic humiliation of Chari us.
7. A rapid series of sequences and landscapes represent the passing
of twenty years for Marcel: Venice, Combray revisited, Paris during the
war, Marcel "motionless as an owl" in a sanatorium.
8. An expansion and modification of the opening section, with
the reverse effect of our now recognizing images that were incompre–
hensible the first time. The links between key experiences emerge;
memory has kept them intact. At the reception the forty-year-old
Marcel meets the eighteen-year-old Mlle de Saint-Loup, Swann's
granddaughter. A rapid montage of shots, symmetrical with the
opening, ends with the camera panning into the yellow patch of the
Vermeer painting. We hear Marcel 's voice: "It was time to begin."
I may have done too much cuing and voice-leading, but the film
takes shape in these loose clumps of narrative. Any Proustian will
noti ce the major omissions: Marcel's significant sleep and dream
scenes, including the opening; Aunt Leonie and the daily round of life
in Combray; the Madeleine incident of involuntary memory; Elstir the
painter and Bergotte the writer; all meditations on philosophical and
psychological subjects. Their absence causes only temporary disap–
pointment. A reader unfamiliar with the novel may have trouble
orienting himself. For example, three times Pinter begins a major
sequence with an establishing shot or shots from the middle of the
action and then has to use flashbacks to explain what is going on. The
disruption seems arbitrary, even gratuitous. It does not come out of the
novel nor does it belong to Marcel's or the narrator's memory processes.
Such cinematographic manipulation creates unnecessary obscurity.
