War and Remembrances

TIME AND memory were consistent concerns for the French director Alain Resnais, who died in 2014 at 91. Historical trauma was a preoccupation as well, at least during the first stage of Resnais’s long career.

For these reasons, among others, Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963) can be considered his quintessential film. As revisited in Criterion’s excellent new Blu-ray transfer, made from a 2015 digital restoration, it also appears to be his greatest.

Spectators may have been pleasurably confounded by Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), an art-house hit when it opened in New York in March 1962, but the initial audience for Muriel appears to have been simply confounded.

“More than 2,000 patrons of the New York Film Festival were mystified last night by an ambiguous, avant-garde French drama about the Algerian war,” Eugene Archer wrote in The New York Times in 1963, adding that Muriel set its audience “astir with heated discussions about its importance and possible interpretation. Almost everyone agreed that it was impossible to understand after a single viewing.” Perhaps, but appreciation and understanding are not necessarily identical.

As compared with Marienbad, Muriel tells a relatively straightforward story. (The script was by Jean Cayrol, the concentration camp survivor who wrote the narration for Resnais’s classic documentary Night and Fog.) It’s the way in which the plot unfolds that is radically unconventional. The action is chronological but fragmentary, filled with parallels and mysteries.

Muriel is set in Boulogne-sur-mer, a town on the French side of the English Channel largely destroyed by Allied bombs during World War II and subsequently rebuilt. The protagonist, Hélène (Delphine Seyrig), is a widowed antique dealer and unlucky gambler whose world is further rocked when her pre-war lover, Alphonse (Jean-pierre Kérien), returns to court her, despite having a young mistress in tow.

Meanwhile, Hélène’s stepson, Bernard (Jean-baptiste Thiérrée), is coping with the aftermath of the recent colonial war in Algeria, where he served as a soldier. Highstrung and reclusive, he speaks of a nonexistent girlfriend, Muriel, who manifests the guilty memory of a wartime atrocity in which he participated.

Hélène lives in a reconstructed town, surrounded by old objects she sells for a living. Alphonse keeps bringing up, and most likely fictionalising, their distant personal history, while Bernard alternately denies and attempts to document his. “I’m collecting evidence,” he explains more than once. Muriel is all about all the ways that the past makes itself present.

The screenplay supplies the exits and entrances of a stage play. But the largely associative montage is highly cinematic and overtlymodernist,basedlessonthecharacters’ histrionics than a sense of clashing vectors and visual force fields. At times, Resnais intercuts multiple conversations or matches the sound of one interaction to the image of another so that the movie seems to be talking to itself.

Around the time that one character angrily asks, “Can’t we be done with the past?,” Resnais decides the clear the stage. The movie becomes almost antic and then powerfully abrupt as the principals begin to disappear. In essence, Muriel is a series of ruptures — both for Resnais’s characters and within his film — that serve to dramatize the way in which war and colonialism can disrupt individual lives as well as conventional narratives. NYT