“The Very First Cut Lasted About 25 Hours”: María Álvarez on Her Proust Documentary, Le temps perdu

María Álvarez’s 2020 doc Le temps perdu (premiering theatrically on these shores at NYC’s Film Forum August 12th) is the second film in an exquisite trilogy, beginning with 2017’s Las cinéphilas and ending just last year with the IDFA debut of Las cercanas. All three docs are poetic meditations on the intersection of art, aging and memory, similarly focused on vibrant geriatric characters whose connections to cinema, literature and music (in ascending part order) are as profound as life itself. In the case of Le temps perdu reading becomes, in the apt description of one enthusiastic gent, “a creative act” — and an epic one at that. For two decades a band of book-loving — specifically one book, In Search of Lost Time — retirees have met up in a Buenos Aires bistro to read aloud from Marcel Proust’s 3,000-page, seven-volume masterwork. In their meetings they dissect, decipher (Is art an “extension” of life, dependent on it, or can it transcend it?) and find meaning within evocative similes, such as to control the body is like “trying to talk to an octopus.” The latter is a sentiment understood every bit as viscerally by a 21st-century elderly lady recovering from a hip replacement as it did for its turn-of-the-20th-century gay male author. A devoted member of the greying literati describes the sudden sensation of being in Paris while simply waiting to cross the street, noting how wonderful it is to “travel for free.” A man ponders Proust’s scrapping of satisfaction in favor of the “extinction of desire”; while a female reader embraces the author’s “self substitution” as her own experience of changing over the years. And throughout decades of effusive discussion and respectful quarreling at least one consensus comes to the fore: Memories multiply a person after they’re long gone. Which could perhaps explain our own modern entrancement with the moving image as well. So to learn all about the multi-year journey from long book to big screen Filmmaker reached out to the acclaimed Argentinean director the week prior to her doc’s US debut tomorrow at New York’s Film Forum.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.