Swann in Love

The film's story is set as a day in the life of the aging and ill Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons), who looks back on his past life in flashbacks. The young Swann is an idly wealthy eligible bachelor in the best circles of Belle Epoque Paris, although he is still regarded as something of a social outsider because of his Jewish background. He has been having an affair with the Duchess de Guermantes (Fanny Ardant), but he soon becomes intrigued and then obsessed by the young courtesan Odette de Crecy (Ornella Muti). Swann's interest in Odette is at first encouraged by Madame Verdurin (Marie-Christine Barrault), a hostess who oversees a tightly-knit, exclusive, and decadent social circle. His friend, the overtly gay Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon), helps to arrange for Swann and Odette to meet. Swann's obsessive love for Odette, however, threatens Madame Verdurin's control, so she arranges other assignations for the courtesan, inflaming Swann's jealousy. Even though Swann declares himself to believe in a kind of spiritual egalitarianism, his interest in Odette is also aesthetic, as shown in references to a copy he owns of a fresco by Botticelli and his comparisons of Odette to the painting's figure, the Biblical character Zipporah. Odette, on the other hand, considers herself free to socialize and sleep where she pleases, leading Swann to visit a prostitute who might have information about whether Odette sleeps with other women as well as men. Odette does come to contemplate and then suggest marriage to Swann, not so much to "save" her from present life as to insure her future. The Duchess de Guermantes and her husband warn Swann that he and Odette can never be received in upper-class society again if he goes through with the marriage, but as the scene returns to the present, now a mechanized and modernized scene unlike the dreamlike milieu of the past. We see Swann again as an older man and Odette as his wife. Swann's passion has cooled, but he does not seem to reject his choices, even as he faces death soon.