Muriel ou le temps d'un retour

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.

Resnais is one of the seven sages of cinema, perhaps even one of the most important ones. Within him we find others, like Godard and Marker, who inherited the problems he first posited with clarity of vision and eloquence of mood. Problems of memory, firstly how the past forms manifest in consciousness and synthesize an illusionary space which we then inhabit (in itself a poignant inspection of the mechanisms of cinema), more importantly what these past forms are, which we understand as the self and identity, and how they trap us in meaningless dilemmas.

His astounding contribution to this field, is in how he brilliantly envisions this space by means of a visual vocabulary and how he articulates within it. The museum in Hiroshima (which reappears here again, as homage), the hotel in Marienbad.

We find the wandering of memory again in Muriel, in a form a tad less inspired this time than those films.

Passions past and present, which defined the participants as persons and left indelible marks on their souls, we see how they appear again after time. We see these people use memory as the only means of reliving time, of painfully trying to claim again the ethical vindication that escaped them the first time. How this past, projected in their minds, appears again around them to trap them anew. And we see how, their lives stifled as a result of those past anxieties, the memory of these things points at no way out.

The characters in this are fittingly restless, always rushing particularly nowhere, actually running from things they won't admit. Running perhaps against all hope that they will face them again. Moments of reflection are burdened with half-remembered sadness, while life outside continues indifferently.

Entire scenes of this play out as they would in ordinary melodrama, then the narrative seems to break down for a time. Virtually recalling fragments of images and conversations which mean nothing, we become privy to the destructive powers of memory. We actually experience the disorientation as part of the movie.

But Muriel lacks something in comparison to those other films. Perhaps it's the political angle (re the Algiers conflict and how it resonates in a complacent French bourgeois society), which in previous Resnais films is quietly buried underneath, dormant and supine, yet here greets us upfront, often violently demanding our discourse. Perhaps it's the pastel color palette, that may had been intented to invoke the contours of melodrama whose tropes the movie rearranges, but renders the film now a relic of the times.

Nonetheless Resnais here gives us an important realization. How we spend the present moment reliving past sufferings or anticipating the future with fear or hope, allowing these chimeras of the mind, born of desire, to cloud our soul, to disrupt our contact with the world. He gives us this not as a grave speech, something Bergman would do who was impotent in the face of suffering, but in the form of a merry jingle, which one character playfully recites after a dinner gathering, as a way of reminding us how trivial and unimportant these past or future fears are.

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.

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''

not for the casual DVD renter. Muriel is *not* entertainment but a film that demands that we endure its theatricality and embalmed atmosphere in order to reflect, along with Resnais, about various kinds of unbearable pasts, personal and national. The city of Boulogne is itself a character in Muriel, rebuilt and unrecognizable after the bombings of World War II...Helene (Delphine Seyrig) is an antique dealer whose home is her gallery--so she lives in a jumble of distant French pasts all the better to avoid her own. The "home movie" sequence is one of the few in French cinema of the 60s where the Algerian War is figured--but here, we see happy soldiers hanging out, images to send home (and to French TV), while the voice-over (Helene's stepson) recounts the rape and torture of the Algerian woman named in the title. Daring, in light of French censorship of any text that compromised state security during the "Algerian situation." Muriel will leave you with more questions than resolutions.