Ruiz successively adapted, in 1998 and 2000, two monuments of French literature: Marcel Proust’s Time Regained and Jean Giono’s Savage Souls. These are far from being his first adaptations; in a sense, Ruiz has never done anything else. Beyond such examples as The Penal Colony (Kafka), Suspended Vocation (Klossowski) and Treasure Island (Stevenson), literary materials haunt all his films, and books as objects are forever materially present – books devoured or devouring, vectors for ‘predatory stories’ (as is said in Three Lives and Only One Death) and proliferating theories.

Adaptation, in Ruiz, is a complex operation of condensation and expansion, shifts and substitutions: in some sense a dream-work, via which the initial, disfigured material appears only as one possible version of a series of avatars turning around the same narrative atom: in Treasure Island Jim Hawkins (Melvil Poupaud), who helps with the writing of his own story and finds several different copies of Stevenson’s novel in a library, also stumbles upon an encrypted version in a TV series. But which one is the true story?

Ruiz’s method had to confront two main challenges in the project of adapting Proust. The first, and biggest, is a sort of abstract equivalence between his system of proliferating narratives and the Proustian theory of epiphanic memory. The narrative division in Ruiz’s work never proceeds without a moment or point where everything gathers to form a horizon of meaning – or the eye of a storm: unison, synchronicity, simultaneity are properly Ruizian obsessions (see, on the level of comic metaphor, the two old cronies in L'éveillé du pont de l'Alma who always have to sleep at the same time). His narratives designate not an origin (there is neither past nor future) but a nucleus.

The echoes of narrative situations, and the way in which stories ‘resonate’, are not an equivalent of Proustian extra-temporality but, starting from a similar recourse to analogy, they offer a sort of counter-model. In Time Regained, the most successful moments are those in which the condensation of memories, the mise en scène of crossing ‘temporal lines’, does not open up the construction of an individual subjectivity (as in Proust), but rather an esprit du temps, a Zeitgeist of this twentieth century that begins with World War I.

And it is photography or cinema which, each time, clinches the resonance between interior events and world events: the scene where, in a room filled with hats, under the eye of St-Loup (Pascal Greggory) in military garb, young Marcel (Georges du Fresne) discovers the terrifying image of a donkey in agony inside a small viewing apparatus; or where an older Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella) sees himself as a child in the street, flashes of white falling like bombs upon the image framed by the train window, which is then converted into a still photograph; or, finally, where the hero in a dual incarnation (the child-Marcel operating a movie camera) levitates in front of a cinema screen that is showing violent news images to fine Parisian society, while in voice-off we hear the reading of a letter from Gilberte (Emmanuelle Béart).

Marcel constantly circulates in the midst of a crowd of ‘his’ characters, just like the walk-through of the tableaux vivants in The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting. That is to say, anything which would constitute the totality of a world hides at its core, invisibly, a horizon or hole which empties and kills it: a missing painting, a memory, war. A sickly film, among Ruiz’s most morbid, Time Regained succeeds in turning Proust’s madeleine into a kind of fatal epidemic.