Muriel (film)
| Muriel | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Alain Resnais |
| Produced by | Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Jean Cayrol |
| Starring |
Delphine Seyrig Jean-Pierre Kérien Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée Nita Klein |
| Music by | Hans Werner Henze |
| Cinematography | Sacha Vierny |
| Edited by |
Kenout Peltier Eric Pluet |
|
Release date
|
24 July 1963 (France) |
|
Running time
|
115 min. |
| Country | France/Italy |
| Language | French |
Muriel (French: Muriel ou le temps d'un retour, literally Muriel, or the Time of a Return) is a 1963 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was Resnais's third feature film, following Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961), and in common with those films it explores the challenge of integrating a remembered or imagined past with the life of the present. It also makes oblique reference to the controversial subject of the Algerian War, which had recently been brought to an end. Muriel was Resnais's second collaboration with Jean Cayrol, who had also written the screenplay of Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955).
Hélène, a widow who runs an antique business from her own apartment in Boulogne-sur-Mer, is visited by a past lover, Alphonse. Her stepson, Bernard, is tormented by the memory of a girl named Muriel whom he has participated in torturing while doing military service in Algeria.
The story takes place over 15 days in September–October 1962. (The screenplay provides specific dates and times for each scene, but these are not apparent in the film.) An extended sequence takes place on the first day (a section lasting about 45 minutes: the introductions of Alphonse and his 'niece' Françoise to Hélène and Bernard, and their first meal together). Another long sequence takes place on the last day (the Sunday lunch and its revelations, and the scattering of the principal characters in their different directions). The intervening days are represented in a series of fragmented scenes, which are chronological but seldom consecutive, and the passage of time is blurred.
Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol first discussed the project of Muriel in 1959. They developed the script while Resnais was working on L'Année dernière à Marienbad as well as on two other (uncompleted) projects relating to the then contentious topic of the war in Algeria. Cayrol, though primarily a poet and novelist, was himself interested in film-making and editing, and he produced a screenplay for Muriel in which nearly all of the complex editing sequences were outlined.
Filming took place between November 1962 and January 1963. Location shooting was done in Boulogne-sur-Mer, which is almost another character in the film, a town whose centre has seen rapid rebuilding after extensive war damage and which is presented as both ancient and modern, uncertainly balanced between its past and future. The scenes in Hélène's apartment where most of the action takes place were filmed on a set at Studios Dumont in Épinay, but Resnais asked the designer Jacques Saulnier to reconstruct exactly a real apartment which he had seen in Boulogne, even down to the colour of the woodwork. The décor of the apartment is modern but, because of Hélène's business as an antique dealer, it is full of furniture of different styles and periods which continually change through the film. Resnais explained his intentions: "We used everything that could give this impression of incompleteness, of unease. ...The challenge of the film was to film in colour, that was essential, never to move the camera position, to film a week behind the [time of the] scenario, to invent nothing, and to do nothing to make it prettier".
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