Marcel Proust, just the way you always pictured him: the milky eyes, the dark bags beneath them, the coughing and wheezing, the twenty-four-hour-a-day pajamas and robe -- all the sundry signs of a sensitivity so great that it compels him, for example, to insulate his room with cork. What the filmmaker, Percy Adlorn, mostly concentrates on, however, is what you normally don't think to picture: the devoted housekeeper-cum-nursemaid-cum-confidante, waiting with transcendental patience for the buzzer to ring, quick with café-au-lait and croissants, taking dictation between coughs and wheezes, devising an accordion method of patching together the scraps of M. Proust's emerging masterpiece. The movie, a two-pronged story of fanatical dedication, that of the artist and that of his servant, is a bit of a plodder, but by steady accumulation of mundane incident and detail, it does achieve an inkling of such dedication, as well as a more believable portrait of an artist than usual on screen. Best scene: Proust at his dandiest, spruced up and white-gloved, sitting in private audience to a Cesar Franck chamber piece and instructing the assembled quartet to skip around in the score, to his favorite parts, as though he were simply lifting up and setting down a phonograph needle. With Eva Mattes and Jurgen Arndt. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd
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