Ben Parker 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.

chaos-rampant 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.

dfwforeignbuff Muriel (Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour) Muriel, or The Time of Return 1963 In the seacoast town of Boulogne, Hélène sells antique furniture, living with her step-son, Bernard, who's back from military duty in Algiers. An old lover of Hélène's comes to visit - Alphonse - with his niece Françoise; he too is back from Algiers, where he ran a café. Bernard speaks of his fiancée, Muriel, whom Hélène has not met. The narrative, like memory & intention, is jumpy; the past obscured by guilt, misperceptions, & missed possibilities. Appearances deceive, things change. As Hélène & Alphonse try to sort out a renewal, everyone seems off-kilter just enough to hint that all cannot end well. Can anyone know another? Delphine Seyrig won a Volpi Cup for best actress at the 1963 Venice Film Festival. The film was nominated for a Golden Lion. I only recently heard about Resnais while reading up on new foreign films not release here in USA (or in limited release) His new film is Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass) which won a lot acclaim at Cannes & other festivals this year. Muriel is a film that is about thinking about past times. I Interesting exploration of memory/existentialism. It is also a film about madness. Several of the characters appear to be mad ( or more than mildly eccentric in many ways. ) As a film maker I find his French new wave & camera techniques & storytelling very fresh & inventive. This is my first film of his to view I have ordered most all except the one that bombed. (I Want to go home) I guess if you are not one of the art film crowd the movie will be too choppy & weird for you. I think I will watch it again this weekend. I found it intriguing. I loved the opera arias interspersed with the odd ball Avant garde jazz. Strange tale strange music strange story strange film making techniques. I LOVED THIS FILM. One problem on my disc some of the subtitles hung & I missed the conversation in a few scenes then they would come back on again. I am looking for the script to the movie or the full subtitles. Resnais's images are never quite as striking in this film as they were with a limited color palette (in some of his other films) Sacha Vierny creates some gorgeous Antonioni-like shots of landscapes and architecture.

arp46 This movie was made in the context of the revolution in the French cinema and novel which took place in the sixties. Just like the work of Margueritte Duras and Claude Simon whose novels avoided a straightforward narrative style, this movie tells its story in an episodic and almost surreal manner.This can make it difficult going for anyone seeking a simple tale, well told. But, if your taste runs to the more abstract, there is a lot to like here. Like "Juliet of the Spirits" this movie is infused with an intensely subjective portrayal of the story which unfolds of a betrayed love, an act of war time atrocity, and the desparate plight of a compulsive gambler.Excellent cinematography and direction make this movie a wonderful and richly textured work which deserves several viewings to appreciate completely.