Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963) – A. Resnais

Another puzzle film from Alain Resnais, his third feature (after Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad).  As in the earlier films, the trick is to try to piece together the “facts” of the narrative from the behaviors shown and the statements of the various characters.  However, as in real life, these “clues” may be subject to duplicity, randomness, irrelevance, transience, and so on.  That is, our actions, statements, and, yes, thoughts and feelings may hold little bearing for our true pasts, presents, or futures.  To put this another way, we are all impacted by real and faulty memories of our pasts, current perceptions (also accurate or misbegotten) of the situations and relationships we find ourselves in, and motivations and expectations for the future (realistic or unrealistic).  So, trying to pinpoint the psychological experience of another person from the outside seems an impossible task.  Of course, this is exactly the task that Resnais sets for us in Muriel.  Unlike other film directors, he refuses to “set the stage” and provide exposition that tells viewers the facts of the story that they couldn’t otherwise know.  True, some of our other better directors (such as the Iranians Farhadi or Kiarostami) force us to figure out what is happening and leave room for subjectivity in their equations, but no one engages in as much wilful misdirection as Resnais, while somehow remaining true to how people really experience their lives, in bursts of disconnected cognitive and affective experiences.  Resnais’s editing style follows this logic, with an array of jump-cuts and non-sequiturs thrown in amidst the more straightforward (but still strangely detached) narrative sequences.  The plot, for what it is worth, revolves around Delphine Seyrig’s antique dealer who summons an old lover from the past to visit her in Bologne.  He has (apparently) spent 15 years in Algeria, from where her stepson has just returned after a stint in the military.  Over the course of the film, we and they try to reconcile their conflicting memories of their shared past, to navigate their current interactions and living arrangements, and to understand what is possible for their future together (or apart). Meanwhile, the stepson has to cope with traumatic memories of the torture of a girl, Muriel, that he witnessed during the war.