CALIFORNIA MOVIE JOURNAL (January 2022)

[Chris Knipp]

MURUEL OU LE TEMPS D'UN RETOUR (Alain Resnais 1963). Another in the Criterion Channel's current offerings of Nouvelle Vague films that like Zazie I'd not previously seen. One by Resnais many say is his most typical and also his best (see J. Hoberman's simple but clarifying 2016 Times piece). A brief, densely edited drama, both theatrical and highly cinematic (in a very chilly way), about two generations, spotlighting how war, exemplified in WWII and France's Algerian colonial conflict, fractures emotions, memories, mindsets and lives, focusing on a woman (Delphine Seyrig), her traumatized stepson (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée),and her returned former lover (Jean-Pierre Kérien). Set in the war-destroyed and postwar-rebuilt seaport town of Boulogne-sur-Mer in a screenplay by concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol, Muriel might be seen as Marienbad's ideas reexamined, this time more realistically, less abstractly, and in color, with a specificity whose remaining vagueness Patrick Modiano (2014 Nobel Prizewinner and co-author of Lacombe, Lucien) would understand. An eye-opener, it's stubbornly unfun but fun to unpack, as attendees of the first New York Film Festival may have found in Sept. 1963 following the film's late-Aug. Venice debut.