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MURIEL
Directed by: Alain Resnais.
Written by: Jean Cayrol.
Produced by: Anatole Dauman.
Director of Photography: Sacha Vierny.
Edited by: Claudine Merlin, Kenout Peltier & Eric Pluet.
Music by: Hans-Werner Henze.
Released by: Koch Lorber Films.
Language: French with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: France/Italy. 112 min. Not Rated.
With: Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kérien, Nita Klein & Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée. DVD Features: Interview with François Thomas, author of L’atelier d’Alain Resnais. Trailer.

This curiosity is directed by one of that ragtag group of critics from the Cashiers du Cinema. After his first two theatrical features, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais continued to wipe away conventions. According to the interview accompanying this DVD, his third film is broken up in a five-act structure, but the middle chunk is jumbled around and fragmented even with its underlining linear storylines. Unlike Resnais’ other Nouvelle Vague counterparts like Truffaut and particularly Godard (due to the numerous jump cuts here), it’s never as compelling as it could have been because of the detachment from the characters. The chopped and elliptical storytelling may seem years ahead of its time, but the editing style trumps absorbing characterizations.

A widow, Hélène (Delphine Seyrig, who disappears convincingly into playing an older woman), runs an antiques shop and is paid a visit by an old lover, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien). Hélène and Alphonse have a history together, this much is certain, a wartime romance of which their memories aren’t very reliable (at least at first). Accompanying him is his “niece,” Françoise (Nita Klein). Joining them for an awkward dinner is Hélène’s Algerian war vet stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée). After this reunion, Alphonse subsequently decides to stick around in Hélène’s sleepy coastal town, to which Nita complies. Throughout, Resnais emphasizes the power of memories that are shared or completely made up. As Alphonse says, “Every person is a private world.” Or viewed another way, all the characters are lying, with some being better at it than others.

In the beginning, the very first shots go by at a fast and abrupt clip, at least 30 shots in the first 30 seconds, more or less, revealing Hélène’s apartment and a customer at her door, whose identity becomes, like the rest of the film, clearer at the end. Resnais’ unpredictable method has its moments of peaked interest, but the valleys are hard to bear because of his reluctance to film such everyday affairs more clearly as opposed to all over the place.

Maybe Resnais is testing the audience as well as himself to see if he and the editors can pull off putting a mishmash of images together to prove a point about what serves as a collective memory. Occasionally he is successful. Maybe the most effective and emotional scene comes when Bernard shows footage of French soldiers relaxing on a field in Algeria to a friend. His voiceover about what happened to the often mentioned but never seen Muriel suddenly takes on the same power of style and substance from Resnais' other work (Marienbad). (Remarkably, Muriel predates the groundbreaking The Battle of Algiers by one year in its corrosive reflection of that war’s legacy.) But moments like these are fleeting, and by the time the dramatic momentum builds in the last act, where an old “friend” of Alphonse arrives unexpectedly and lays the truth down about the love affair(s) decades before, it’s almost too little and too late. Jack Gattanella
March 20, 2007