Muriel ou le temps d'un retour

It's about 50 years since I first saw Muriel; in those days the wounds of the Algerian war were still fresh: bodies of Algerian immigrants were found floating in rivers, Sartre's apartment was fire-bombed because he'd supported Algerian independence and so on. Resnais had enough reason to make a film about those troubled days. The trouble with the film has to do with the uneasy juxtaposition of domestic drama (the unhappy love of Hélène and Alphonse) with the ordeal of Bernard and Robert in Algeria, and the dead girl over whom Bernard obsesses. The love story is so much more interesting than the political theme that we are left frustrated with the necessity of ignoring the latter to the benefit of the former.

Delphine Seyrig gives a wonderful performance as Hélène; she's always in movement, trying to calm Bernard down, trying to coax some emotion out of the stony Alphonse, on the phone with Claudie cadging some money to gamble at the casino (she's not good about repaying debts). Jean Champion shows up in the second half as Ernest, Alphonse's brother-in-law, trying to bring him back to a sense of his duties to his family. He sings that wonderful song at the lunch party, then launches into an angry tirade about Alphonse's dereliction of duty. It's a superb performance. Nita Klein as Françoise is appropriately prickly, analyzing her options as she sees Alphonse sliding away from her. Claude Sainval is very oily as de Smoke, a man who can't stop thinking about the money he's lost on a derelict building: ''can't even get the doorknobs from it''

Muriel is a riddle. It may just have been the first art-house movie I ever saw. It was on local TV one day when I was about 18 maybe and I left it on because I was studying French and had been told to watch French movies. I found myself amazed and dumbfounded by the jump-cuts and seeming lack of continuity between scenes.

Today, 12 years later or so I've finally seen the whole thing and I feel like I saw a completely different movie to the one I saw last time. I feel I understand who the characters are, what the central mystery is, but I understand very little of the minute by minute goings on of where characters are moving and why. I feel this is a film that intentionally tries to disorient you constantly. Just as you are becoming comfortable in a scene, it will switch completely and never return. It reminds me of a perfectly normal film about four characters and their interrelations that has been sliced up and then recreated anew in the editing room. The characters make reference to dreams and memory, but on this viewing I didn't see it as necessarily a recreation of those things, but as a depiction of disorientation.

I found the newsreel section in the middle, which I don't at all remember seeing 12 years ago, particularly important addition, and the whole thing is just as refreshing as it ever was.

Slow burn relationship drama, an old relationship renewed and examining current relationships; lovers, family... The title of the film itself seems a play on words as it's less a take-your-pick affair than it is saying the film is about these two things, connected but because the characters share connections in the present day.

Here again we see Resnais exploring themes of time and memory as was the case with his previous two feature films: Last Year At Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour. This, his third feature, reflects on times past, the characters talk about the past, but it doesn't go into filmed flashbacks or creative revisiting, looping back on itself, adding or changing subtle details. Memory does also come into play. With the one side of the two stories it's two characters with a shared past, of which one asks why this, how come, what were you thinking then...the other attempts to answer. But it remains elusive, a story told in pieces. Hard to assimilate as we aren't really shown enough connect-the-dot details of a shared past so much as we are just shown they had a shared past and make of it what you will. This approach can wear thin...it lacks cohesion and as a consequence comes up short on dramatic tension. The other part of the story also looks to the past, also fragmented and elusive.

Early on the sound score, arriving at specific points, provides more than emphasis or support as it temporarily lends an air of mystery or sly menace that wouldn't necessarily be noticed at all otherwise. Neat trick in the way it suggests unsettled feelings or hints at perhaps darker revelations to come, something I didn't get from the dialogue alone. It too is another piece. There is other symbolism to be found, a gun shown disassembled, in pieces...

At a couple points the film goes into quick edits. A single line of dialogue, jump to another scene and another line. On and on. More little pieces. It may have seemed a clever film editing technique at the time but the dialogue as presented is disconnected, unfocusing the passage of time with muddled glimpses. Which may have been the point but more than anything I found it to be somewhat annoying.

Enough. The film is an exercise in patience. For me, too much so because, even though it comes to some conclusions, in the end I didn't feel it was enough to justify the scattered approach of uncertain reflections and eventual points made. Even though from the same time period, I don't feel this film is in the same class as the Resnais films Marienbad and Hiroshima, two films that are masterpieces or nearly so. You could say the approach with Muriel is radical, as was the case in those two previous films, but that doesn't, in and of itself, make it a great film. In my opinion, yours may differ.

This movie was made in the context of the revolution in the French cinema and novel which took place in the sixties. Just like the work of Margueritte Duras and Claude Simon whose novels avoided a straightforward narrative style, this movie tells its story in an episodic and almost surreal manner.

This can make it difficult going for anyone seeking a simple tale, well told. But, if your taste runs to the more abstract, there is a lot to like here. Like "Juliet of the Spirits" this movie is infused with an intensely subjective portrayal of the story which unfolds of a betrayed love, an act of war time atrocity, and the desparate plight of a compulsive gambler.

Excellent cinematography and direction make this movie a wonderful and richly textured work which deserves several viewings to appreciate completely.

Some decades before Haneke's 'Cache' once more centralised the trope of Algeria-guilt amongst the bourgeoisie, 'Muriel' is less a polemical allegory-and less marked by immigrant experience-and more a kind of spider's web of implication, its critique of French conduct in Algeria constructed as a kind of puzzle which is only really a puzzle if we ignore those political truths hiding in plain sight-which is precisely the point. Haneke is concerned to reveal his cards half-way through the film-it's important that one *get* and *absorb* a message. Likewise, in Muriel, the account of torture committed by the ex-soldier now returned to Boulogne-sur-Mer plays out at the half-way point. But for Resnais and scriptwriter Jean Cayrol, to whom the film equally owes its striking detail and shape, form and message are imbricated in closer ways. Likewise, compared to other experiments with narrative within avant-garde cinema of the period-including Resnais' own-here, complexities of perception rendered through avant-garde technique may reflect existential questions of memory, desire and so on, but more precisely, they serve a political purpose. As in Demy's Parapluies de Cherbourg the following year, the film's critique of French conduct in Algeria is presented as both motor to and peripheral figure / irritant within what is in some ways a love story. But there are no Michel Legrand songs here, no bright-burning neon glow, no dwelling in sentiment: the film is analytical, critical, clipped, dense. The constructs of desire, loss, the attempt to regain past intimacy, told in half-finished stories, never-received letters, interrupted monologues, the constant unspoken-the evasions and illusions of romantic love-are open secrets around which the lovers tip-toe, traipse and on which they trample, while the Algerian conflict is imbricated within the social fabric of a particular town, and, metonymically, the broader society in which it has its place. Of particular interest for the film is the way that the community of that town is constructed through a mixture of the repressed memory of trauma (the second world war and national service in Algeria-attack by or complicity with fascist occupation domestically and participation in colonial violence abroad), the militarist underlay of the business world, of Gaullism, of particular modes of masculine identity. The clipped precision of the film's extreme fast-cutting turns editing at once almost hallucinatory in its flashes of distorted logic and extraordinarily precise in its planned juxtapositions: the trope of mystery-who is Muriel? What happened in Algeria? What happened to break apart the now elderly lovers reunited in a web of half-truths, half-desires, and deceit?-a diagnostic frame at once personal and social. Resnais may suggest that film itself-at least, as conceived of as a repository of direct truth, the authenticity of visual experience-is inadequate: as when the young ex-soldiers' Algerian footage literally burns up in the projector when exposed to the light. But film, understood differently-for its challenge to, its going against the grain of perception-provides the shock to the habituated dailiness of looking so that an antique table, the door to a café, a walk around town, the assassination of a far-right terrorist, flicker and bunch up together like a terrible revelation of what lies beneath.