Based on the memoirs of Marcel Proust's housekeeper during the last nine years of Proust's life, Percy Adlon's Céleste is described by Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris as “one of the most profound tributes one art form has ever paid another.... Anyone who has ever felt the slightest stirrings of passion for Proust is bound to be deeply moved by this elegant rendering of the domestic details involved in the heroic creation of one of the world's literary masterpieces.... It is a strange work that Percy Adlon has fashioned from (Monsieur Proust by Céleste Albaret), but it is a work also that is comfortable with its strangeness. The very notion of this quintessentially French subject rendered in German, and for much of the time an unusually spare, laconic German, seems odd at first. Ultimately, however, the extraordinarily sensitive and subtle performances of Eva Mattes as Céleste and Jürgen Arndt as Marcel Proust sweep all before them.”
Percy Adlon's new film The Swing (Die Schaukel) will be presented this month at the San Francisco International Film Festival.