Muriel, or the Time of Return

Director: Alain Resnais

1963 / 115min / DCP

Further drawing parallels between love and war, as he did in Hiroshima mon amour, and the untrustworthiness of memory, as in his Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel is a sort of summation of the themes introduced by Resnais in his breakout works, and a new benchmark in avant-garde experimentation. Newly returned from the war in Algeria, Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée) is wrestling with his memory of the horrors he witnessed on the battlefield, while meanwhile his widowed stepmother, Hélène (Delphine Seyrig), is plunged back into to the scene of her own private trauma, her lingering affair with on-and-off lover, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien), who has returned to pay her court. The chronological narrative, shattered into a mosaic of fragments, becomes a puzzle with missing pieces, creating a disorientation so true to our experience of memory that it’s at first utterly unrecognizable in its originality. On hand to observe its making, Liliane de Kermadec served as set photographer on the film.

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of Liliane de Kermadec: The Price of Freedom