The Adaptation as Antique Show

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Two new films replace inner lives with interior decoration

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration, searches for the armoire or settee that can serve as the objective correlative for a character's unspoken, perhaps dramatically unspeakable, fears and fancies. One may therefore wish to approach Swann in Love or The Bostonians undemandingly, almost as one would an antique show, browsing and ruminative but not expecting to make powerful emotional connections with the objects on view. On that level, Volker Schlondorffs lightly heated rearrangement and compression of approximately one-fifteenth of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is altogether more beguiling than James Ivory's attenuated version of one of Henry James' liveliest long novels.

Tugging the viewer through the streets and salons of la Belle Epoque Paris, Schlondorff offers less a version of Proust than a pictorial comment on him. For Proust the heavily draped and cluttered rooms, the constraints of clothing, language, manners and social ritual were familiar givens, matters for exquisitely observed, morally neutral description. For Schlondorff they are a malevolent astonishment. If there is a rational explanation for the obsessive, socially destructive love Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons) feels for the courtesan Odette de Crecy (Ornella Muti), it is to be found in these oppressive surroundings, where the very air breathes of neurasthenic surrender and the will is strangled in brocade. If the screenplay by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carriere and Marie-Helene Estienne omits or hastily vulgarizes Proust's nuanced sensitivity to social gesture and psychological tremor, the film nevertheless suggests a legitimate response to this most daunting of literary material. Well and bravely acted, Swann in Love is a mesmerizing, even haunting experiment.

No one will ever be tempted to employ terms like that to describe The Bostonians, for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it. There is a certain undiminishable power in the struggle between Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), all snaky masculine guile, and Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), representing feminism at its most sternly ideological, for the innocent soul of Verena Tarrant. But Ivory's camera behaves like a tourist trapped meekly behind a velvet rope at a historical reconstruction, and most of his actors seem afraid they might damage the nicely chosen antiques the curator has permitted them to perch upon.

The exception is Redgrave. Icy furies move inside this Olive: hatred of men, belief in ideals, repressed lesbian longings. She offers teasing glimpses of them all, but no naked displays. This is a soul under perpetual migraine attack. And a performance one admires all the more because of the barren soil from which it springs.