Ruiz’s film has no particular plot. Or, rather, there are many. Proust’s “Time Regained” postscripts the action of his novel’s six preceding volumes. The narrator revisits past events and, in effect, explains how the entire work came into being. The movie opens with Marcel on his deathbed, imagining his novel. His recent return to Paris is much on his mind. World War I is raging as he re-encounters his old social circle, attends their soirees and observes their affairs. People are recalled at various ages; the writer is watched in memories by his childhood self.

“If there were a prize for sheer ambition at this year’s New York Film Festival, it would justly go to ‘Time Regained,’” Janet Maslin wrote in her mixed review for The New York Times. Proust is a writer whose work defeated such distinguished adapters as Joseph Losey and Luchino Visconti; Ruiz succeeds because his movie is something of a search for Proust’s own search.

“Time Regained” lacks the majestic screwiness of Ruiz’s earlier fun house labyrinths, like “Three Crowns of the Sailor” and “Life Is a Dream,” but finds all manner of visual equivalents to its source — not just the circular narrative or modernist, multiple-perspective simultaneity but also the way that movies themselves are predicated on physiological memories. Photographs abound, as do match cuts, sound bridges and other forms of associative editing. All about remembering (cinema not least), this luxurious bath in the river of time is, to lift a phrase from Proust, consecrated to “the miracle of an analogy.”

The movie is also a testament to the Proustian notion that true paradises are those that are lost. “Time Regained” had its theatrical opening at the recently closed Lincoln Plaza Cinema; it may move some who see it again with an additional sense of time gone by.