Word: charlus
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...ideal Proust in pictures. It roams through prewar drawing rooms, attending to whispers of malice and amour. A brilliant man (Marcello Mazzarella, as Marcel) talks to a ravishing woman (Emmanuelle Beart, as Gilberte) of an old wound. "Heartbreak can kill," he says, "but leaves no trace." The roue Charlus (John Malkovich) takes his sexual pleasures at the business end of a whip. These characters are often crushed by the burden of glamour, but the film isn't. It wears its gravity with a buoyant ease, seeing through walls, magically turning statues into people. It shows Marcel, as a child, watching...
...well-developed standard for judging the culpability of fiction; libel rulings have been concerned mostly with news reports. Real people have served as models for fictional characters, from Proust's Baron Charlus to Bellow's Humboldt. An author's weave of truth and invention is difficult to unravel, and never more so than in a semiautobiographical work like The Bell Jar, which was first published in Britain in 1963, just a month before Plath committed suicide. The story of a young woman's descent into madness spoke to the rising women's movement as well as the romantic instincts...
...depressing view of relations between the sexes. Neither Swann nor Odette seem to transcend their own emotional needs when together. Curiously, though, Schlondorf ignores some avenues that might have shed light on such sexual politics. He spends very little time, for example, on the homosexual relationship between Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon) and a young Jew-potentially fertile ground for some parallels...
...literal dead end, a pothole of a tropical police state where the street cleaners lie in wait to cart away the appointed victims. These include some of the great romantics of history and literature, a sort of aristocracy of personal excesses: Casanova, Lord Byron, Proust's Baron de Charlus, Marguerite Gautier, and Kilroy, an American with a heart "as big as the head of a baby...
...Charles Haas, who referred to himself as "the only Jew ever to be accepted by Parisian society without being immensely rich." Perhaps the most decadent and diabolical habitue of the salons was Comte Robert de Montesquieu, the original of Proust's depraved but magnificently Lear-like Baron de Charlus. Montesquiou was tall and thin, with a Kaiser mustache...