James Monaco begins his Muriel chapter in his book Alain Resnais: The Role of the Imagination, stating that “In Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour, everything comes together for Alain Resnais, and the experiments of the first two feature films pay off.” I should add that I share this view. Whatever qualities the director’s first two films possessed (and they were significant), the third film would prove to be on a completely different level. One of the reasons was the scriptwriter, Jean Cayrol. The two already collaborated on Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), which is one of the most successful films trying to film the unfilmable, regarding the horrors of the concentration camps.
On a superficial level, Muriel is more straightforward than the earlier works. There are no time jumps that could be called flashbacks, and the entire film is set in the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. The story unfolds over two weeks, from September 29 to October 14, 1962, and does not seem to pose major challenges for a spectator who wants to be sure of what is transpiring. However, a closer examination reveals that this is, by far, the director’s most intricate film to date. The very first scene catapults the audience right into the film’s style with its brisk editing. Muriel is a film characterised by its montage, without a travelling shot until the very last scene in the film.
The formal conceit of Muriel
Unlike the first two films, Muriel does not only have a human name in the title instead of places, but also named characters. Hélène (Delphine Seyrig), a widowed antiques dealer in her early forties, resides with her stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée), who has just returned from serving in the Algerian War. She suddenly invites her former lover, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien), to visit. He arrives accompanied by Françoise (Nita Klein), a young actress he introduces as his niece. It soon becomes apparent that Hélène and Alphonse have different recollections of their relationship, and their meetings appear to be marred by miscommunication. In an early scene, Bernard tells Hélène that he will visit Muriel, whom the latter thinks is his girlfriend.
Bernard actually has a girlfriend, Marie-Do (Martine Vatel), who seems to be the sole bright spot in his dour existence. There is also Robert (Philippe Laudenbach), a former army buddy, but their relationship is clearly tense. Resnais wanted to make allusions to the Algerian war already in Last Year at Marienbad. It was a touchy subject in France at the time, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat, which was shot years before Resnais’s film, experienced trouble with censorship. Since Resnais’s approach is more indirect, he didn’t encounter that kind of problem. On the other hand, the film was not nearly as successful with the audience as its two predecessors. The initial reviews were not that understanding either.
Muriel was the director’s first feature in colour, and his most expensive film thus far, but also the film that made the least money. Apparently, the audience, and even worse, the critics, were not ready for the level of formal audacity that Resnais delivered. The music is consistently important in his films, and this time he asked the German composer Hans Werner Henze to write the score. If you are on board with the film, the score works wonders, enhancing a world of instability where all the characters are lost in their surroundings. Hélène sells antiques from her home, which means that her furniture at “home” constantly changes. Something Bernard alludes to acidly early on in the film.
Likewise, the town is undergoing rapid transformation. In one scene, a person is looking for the centre of Boulogne, only to be told that it is where he is. To make Henze’s and Resnais’s formal conceit even more adventurous, significant parts of the composer’s music are sung by Rita Streich. Still, it’s sung at a pitch that makes the words difficult to make out. Apparently, this was a deliberate decision by Resnais, as he felt that the lyrics would render the film’s themes too obvious. In some countries, like Sweden, the lyrics were translated in the subtitles anyway.
The script has a clear five-act structure where three meals play pivotal parts during the beginning, middle, and end. The film is formally perfect during the initial half, but then goes beyond even that, soaring to heights that cinema rarely aims for, much less reaches. The first time I saw Muriel remains the most powerful cinematic experience I’ve ever had, not least towards the end. The use of colour is stunning, including pure whites. The recent restoration managed to ruin most of those qualities. Since the film was not a hit, the Stockholm Cinematheque copy was in great shape, and that is the version that stuck in my mind, even though I only managed to watch it eight times.
The lack of success of Muriel gave Resnais second thoughts, and he expressed that maybe the film was too unclear during the first twenty minutes or so. I could not agree less. This is a film where the form is perfect for the ideas that the director and Jean Cayrol want to present. Every piece is in the exact right place, intensifying the experience of the film to heights which may have been ahead of its time, and unfortunately might be even less suited to “the modern audience”.
In my mind, it is one of the finest works that the art of cinema has ever given us. It still feels remarkably modern. The film was admired by directors as diverse as François Truffaut, Godard, and Joseph Losey. There are clear traces of Muriel in Losey’s Accident (1967). The idea of people, or even humanity, feeling lost in the modern world or life in general has much in common with the films of Antonioni or Jacques Tati’s Playtime. The form serves to portray people worthy of profound compassion, regardless of their flaws. Muriel is not merely a formally audacious film, but a moving, human work.
If the readers have grown tired of my excuse that favourite films are the most difficult to describe, this text, regrettably, proves my point. Resnais’s next film would take a decidedly different step.