Looking For Muriel: A Journey Through and Around the Alain Resnais Film

By Darren Arnold

Muriel, or The Time of Return was director Alain Resnais' first color feature, and its film stock immediately set it apart from many other French movies of the early 1960s. Appearing hot on the heels of Resnais' arthouse smashes Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel failed to attract the same attention as its predecessors, and the film's initial domestic release yielded indifferent box office results. This lukewarm response could perhaps be attributed to Muriel's probing of the still fresh wounds inflicted by the Algerian War, as the French public of the time held little appetite for further discussion of what was widely viewed as a messy, dispiriting conflict.

Yet time has allowed Muriel to slowly emerge as Alain Resnais' masterpiece, and its exquisite distillation of its director's preoccupations marks it out as the quintessential Resnais film. Looking for Muriel examines both the film and its setting of Boulogne-sur-Mer, and also delves into numerous related areas, including the Algerian War, the French New Wave cinema movement, the Second World War, and the wider careers of both Alain Resnais and Muriel's incomparable star, Delphine Seyrig. Muriel's intricate editing and complex script are also discussed, as are other films which touch on similar themes.

 

Darren Arnold is a film critic and author of Devil's Advocates: The Devils and The Pocket Essential Spike Lee. He lives near London with his family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781393254645

Book preview

Out of Step: Muriel In the Context of Early 1960s French Cinema

Chapter One

When we hear mention of the French cinema of the early 1960s, we reflexively think of the freewheeling, Paris-set black-and-white films pioneered by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, both of whom — along with Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette — have endured as the most recognizable faces of the French New Wave. On account of their contributions to legendary French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, these five filmmakers collectively became known as "the Cahiers group. These New Wave directors largely abandoned established French filmmaking methods in favor of portable equipment, direct sound, available light and existing locations; such an approach may have been primarily due to a lack of finance, but it resulted in both a paradigm shift and an urgent, raw and immediate form of cinema, one which railed against the sort of modern studio productions putatively dismissed by Truffaut as le cinéma de papa" (Dad’s cinema).

Given the type of cinema the New Wave had established, Alain Resnais’ Muriel, or The Time of Return appears to be firmly out of step with other French films of the era, so much so that it gives the impression of being completely unaware of any film other than itself. Resnais wasn’t closely aligned with the Cahiers group, but rather belonged to the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) contingent of directors (Paris’ world-famous river, the Seine, was used to demarcate the two camps), a group which also included experimental filmmaker Chris Marker, power couple Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, and Resnais’ sometime editor Henri Colpi. These directors were, and still are, associated with the New Wave, yet their concerns were rather different from those of their contemporaries just across the river: Left Bank directors saw film as just one of several equally valid art forms, a position which stood in stark contrast to that of the movie-obsessed likes of Godard, Truffaut, et al. While Muriel may not have been especially surprising to anyone who had closely tracked Resnais’ career to that point, it was certainly far removed from most other French films of the time, which included the likes of Highway Pickup (Chair de poule, 1963), Be Careful Ladies (Méfiez-vous, mesdames!, 1963), Judex (1963), War of the Buttons (La Guerre des boutons, 1962), Any Number Can Win (Mélodie en sous-sol, 1963), and Chabrol’s Bluebeard (Landru, 1963).

It is worth taking a moment to recap the steps taken by Alain Resnais en route to Muriel: after more than a decade of directing short films — including the Oscar-winning Van Gogh (1948) — Resnais made his belated feature debut in 1959 with Hiroshima mon amour, a daring and critically-lauded work written by acclaimed novelist Marguerite Duras. What is most striking about this film — which concerns a couple raking over the ashes of the past in post-atomic Hiroshima — is that it at no point feels like a debut; there’s a fluency and sureness of touch in evidence which stands at odds with the fidgety, excitable nature of the first features from, say, Truffaut and Godard. While both Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cent coups, 1959) and Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) are widely, correctly considered to be classics, they nevertheless feel like first films, complete with all the energy, hunger and rough edges one would expect to find in inaugural efforts; Hiroshima mon amour, on the other hand, exhibits the style and confidence of a seasoned, established filmmaker. It also contains:

what well may be the ghastliest five minutes ever recorded on commercial film. The scene shifts rapidly from a shot of the Hiroshima museum, to some of the relics of the attack, to graphic sections of film taken in Hiroshima immediately after the bombing. Terrified men and women swim, in flame covered rivers; thousands of people, living and dead, huddle in makeshift hospital-shelters. Director Alain Resnais spares the viewer nothing — the camera methodically records all of the most gruesome effects of immediate radiation burn and lingering radiation sickness, and it is often a few moments before the viewer realizes the full horror of what he has just seen. (Quint, 1960)

Resnais followed this stunning debut with what remains his best-known work, Last Year at Marienbad, an elegant, baffling memory puzzle from the pen of another renowned writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet. Marienbad won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, and the movie’s cultural impact cannot be overstated:

In two months, just in Paris, the film exceeds a hundred thousand admissions. A reporter summarizes the climate around this phenomenon: "What! You’re telling me you haven’t seen Marienbad!… and they looked at me as if I had never heard [Beethoven’s] Ninth nor read [Stendhal’s] La Chartreuse". The diners in town talk only of Marienbad, and in the Latin Quarter students and teachers are recreating Marienbad. [French newspaper] Le Monde launches a big investigation: "For or against Marienbad?" Three hundred readers respond. During a month and a half, a page a day will be devoted to the film in the newspaper. Probably no other film has generated as many articles and contradictory interpretations. […] Marienbad is not only a topic of discussion of aesthetics, but a phenomenon that affects the wider public. Soon, women start to adopt Marienbad hairstyles, and we endlessly play the "Marienbad game" [Nim] with matches. (Brangé, 2018: 13-14)

In the timeline of Resnais’ career, Marienbad brings us up to Muriel and its somewhat anomalous position in the cinema of the day. While Resnais had enjoyed real success with his first two feature films, there was always the sense that his work, like that of many others among the New Wave and its associated movements, was far more likely to command the respect of his peers than it was to win over the man in the street. Resnais, like many of his contemporaries, could be considered to be a director’s director, and such status might lead one to conclude that his work would, to a degree at least, be immune to criticism when it came under the scrutiny of those filmmakers on either immediate side of the Seine — although any such exemption, naturally, would not be applied by those whose job it was to review the films the public would pay to see. Therefore, when Muriel was finally released, it was perhaps not especially surprising that reviewers did not know what to make of it, and François Truffaut, in a chapter titled My Friends in the New Wave in his essay collection The Films in My Life, outlined the extent of the film’s critical opprobrium:

[Muriel’s] reception was very severe: the critics were disarmed and unjust at the same time. Resnais is the most professional of French directors and one of those rare filmmakers who is an artist. There are any number of ways of constructing a screenplay, and many ways of filming it. It is evident that Resnais envisages all of them, makes his choice, and carefully manages every detail of the enterprise, unlike so many directors who work haphazardly, building their plots any old way, filming confused ideas confusedly. (1985: 327-328)

Given the highly ambitious nature of Muriel, such a reaction was perhaps to be expected. However, it wasn’t just the critics who were left bemused (or, as Truffaut put it, disarmed) by Muriel’s unusual filmic grammar: Truffaut, somewhat surprisingly, came across as equivocal when revealing his own response to his friend’s film:

I have already seen Muriel three times without liking it completely, and maybe not liking the same things each time I saw it. I know that I’ll see it again many times. Certainly the critics are right to be demanding with a man of Resnais’s importance, a man esteemed and recognized throughout the world — but the shots leveled at Muriel were rarely aimed at the heart of the subject, but rather at its extremities. (ibid.: 328)

It is perhaps a little too easy to center on some of the relatively negative entries among the initial responses to Muriel, but it is nevertheless interesting to note how Resnais wasn’t given a free ride by his peers — there was no noticeable closing of ranks among his fellow directors. That said, the 1960s was a time — at least in France — where critics could become filmmakers yet remain critics, and the appetite of those in the Cahiers group (and beyond) for appraising and dissecting film continued long after these directors had made their feature debuts. Considering the creative evolution of the members of this set, Richard Brody noted how [t]heir criticism didn’t just foretell and inspire their movies, but also became integrated into them (2010). As Truffaut’s comments on Muriel prove, it was certainly a film which both critics and filmmakers were keen to discuss, no matter their position on this apparently baffling picture. Even if the jury was out on the merits of Muriel, the Marienbad-like amount of time and space given to its analysis proved that Resnais’ film was to be dismissed at one’s peril; it’s almost as if the film’s special qualities had been broadly identified but had yet to be pinpointed. In the above quote from Truffaut, he attests to the film’s replay value; whatever that certain something may have been, it kept bringing him back to