A Marcel Proust film on a Sunday afternoon during the Ascension holiday weekend in Cannes is a festival attraction that few Francophiles can resist. Even more so with the line-up of stars in Raoul Ruiz's Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained), which includes: Catherine Deneuve as the demi-mondaine Odette de Crécy, whom Charles Swann falls in love with; Emmanuelle Béart as Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette; Chiara Mastroianni as Albertine, a spiritual apparition of a girl described by Proust as being "in the first flower of womanhood"; Marie-France Pisier as Madame Simone Verdurin, the patron of a chic literary salon and confidante

of amorous intrigues; and John Malkovich as Baron de Charlus, the loony, aristocratic younger brother of the Duke of Guermantes.

Proust films have always been hits at Cannes. Back in 1981, when Percy Adlon's debut feature film, Céleste, appeared unannounced in the German series programmed in Cinema Le Français on the Rue d'Antibes, it drew an overflow French crowd from off the street and helped considerably to launch the director internationally. Based on an autobiography of Proust's housemaid, who recounted the living and working habits of the French writer, it starred Eva Mattes in the title role.

Two years later, Volker Schloendorff's screen adaptation of Proust's Swann's Way (1983), an opulent production starring Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti, went down in the books that year as one of the festival's major events.

Not enough can be said about Marcel Proust (1871-1922), one of the great novelists and literary figures of our modern age. His seven-volume work, Remembrance Of Things Past (written between 1913 and 1927), ranks with James Joyce's Ulysses as an on-going stream-of-consciousness achievement based on the narrator's real experiences but raised to the high art of fictional recollection.

Swann's Way (1913), stands at the beginning of the cycle, while Time Regained (1927, published five years after the author's death) completes the time scheme of loosely connected events.

Raoul Ruiz's Time Regained opens with Proust on his deathbed in the cork-lined room where he spent much of his life as a victim of asthma. We hear his voice (spoken by Patrice Chéreau) as the writer looks through photos to recall events in his life. Gradually, the real characters of his recollections become the fictional ones of his literary writings.

The lost paradise of his childhood gives way to literary salons in Paris, the vast comédie humaine that surrounded and supported him, followed by the trauma of World War I and the shaping of a new post-war society.

According to the interpretation Raoul Ruiz gives to Proust's attempt "to recreate an impossible timelessness", the baroque blends with the surreal - and everything shatters.

As for the primary figure at the beginning of the literary epic, Charles Swann, he was a rich connoisseur of painting who came often to the family house in Marcel's childhood and was a friend of the aristocratic Duke and Duchess of Guermantes. Swann, who liked to chase women, eventually fell in love with Odette de Crécy, who led him to the literary salon of Madame Verdurin - where, approximately, Ruiz takes up the story.

One might ask how and why an exiled Chilean writer-director ever decided to tackle one of the great classics of French literature. The answer surely lies in the thematic context of one of his previous films, Three Lives And One Soul (1995), a Proustian cinematic vision to the core. Couple this film with the two following, the Dostoyevsky-like Geneology Of A Crime (1996) and the emblematic Shattered Image (1997), and you have a poet-philosopher at work whose films always leave an audience musing over the life-forces and moral questions that mold each and every one of us into what we are, or think we should be. Ron Holloway