Marcel Proust's long, dense masterwork A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is the ultimate unfilmable tome - it's mostly about a man biting into a cake. Time Regained is a daring, failed bid to translate an emotional philosophy into cinematic spectacle. It bobs in and out of its characters' lives, with the audience encouraged to piece together the largely unexplained connections. Sadly, it's more annoying than challenging.
And the cake? It's a sense memory which sends the narrator, at his lowest, back to the past, where he realises that all the joy he's ever experienced is in fact eternally alive. So the next time someone accuses you of dwelling on the past, you could say: "Well, according to Proust, the past and the present are entirely indistinguishable." But you'd get punched.
