Raoul Ruiz's adaptation of the final volume of In Search of Lost Time is a film at once wholly faithful to Proust and to the distinctive vision of its director. Inventing a cinematic equivalent to the novelist's "involuntary memory," Ruiz creates a permeable fiction in which every image opens on another, and every level of the remembrance-from Marcel's cozy childhood memories to his struggles to recall the past-exists on the same plane. The film is a casting miracle, as the actors (leading figures of the contemporary French cinema, and John Malkovich delivering his own French dialogue) are perfect physical and emotional matches for Proust's characters.