Delphine Seyrig in “Muriel, or The Time Of Return.” credit: themoviedb.org
Delphine Seyrig was thirty years old when she shot Muriel, or The Time Of Return (Muriel Ou Le Temps D’Un Retour) (France, 1963), working once again for director Alain Resnais. Donning a mouse-brown wig webbed with strands of silvery-gray and an ever-so-slightly-oversized wardrobe, Delphine portrays a woman, Hélène Aughain, who is at least twelve years older than she herself. But there’s one quick scene early in the film with her beloved stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée), one expression on her face, that radiates both her loving concern for him and the pain of leaving herself vulnerable to his mercurial eccentricities. An enormous amount of emotional history is expressed in that one quick reaction, that split-second shot, and Delphine’s astonishing command of the depth and maturity of her character is established as bedrock. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.
Which turns out to be exactly what Resnais’ film will sink or swim on. Hélène Aughain is a furnishings dealer – she uses her own apartment as her shop, and lives with the tables, chairs, sofas, bedsteads and accessories that make up her stock, and her home. Hélène is a widower – she married her late husband Gérard during the war, taking on his son from his previous marriage, Bernard. The details of Gérard’s passing aren’t shared, but Hélène’s devotion to Bernard is obvious, especially as he’s just returned from a military stint in the French-Algerian War.
As the film begins, we learn that Hélène has corresponded with, and invited for a visit, an old lover of hers, Alphonse Noyard (Jean-Pierre Kérien). She’d had a pre-war affair with him, but he ended it abruptly. Hélène and Bernard prepare to leave the apartment – she to meet Alphonse’s train, and he to visit his girlfriend Muriel. Hélène rushes a customer out of the apartment while Bernard makes himself a café, and Resnais scrambles, overlaps and fractures both the images and the sound to create, in us, the sense of anxiety the characters are experiencing.
Delphine Seyrig and Jean-Pierre Kérien in “Muriel, or The Time Of Return.” credit: nnm.me
The next long sequence of the film describes Alphonse’s arrival and Hélène’s efforts to welcome him into her home. A tall, seemingly elegant silver-haired man, Alphonse is accompanied by Françoise (Nita Klein), whom he introduces as his niece, the daughter of a deceased sister. Hélène walks them from the train station café through downtown Boulogne-Sur-Mer to the apartment building. The flat is clearly smaller and dowdier than Alphonse might have preferred, but he defers to Hélène’s eagerness to be a gracious host. While she serves cocktails and prepares dinner, Bernard returns. Alphonse explains that he’d spent years in Algeria running a very exclusive club on the outskirts of Algiers, but the war necessitated his return to Paris. He’s interested in Bernard’s service, but Bernard is far more interested in pulling small pranks and exasperating Mom. But he and Françoise seem to hit it off, and they go out on their own after dinner, leaving Hélène and Alphonse to reconnect and recollect.
This whole early sequence has a narrative through-line and cohesiveness, yet Resnais’ fashioning of the events is a slower-motion version of the film’s opening array of scattershot images and dialogue. Their walk through downtown contains both present-nighttime backgrounds and inserted daytime shots of the city, and Resnais interrupts their movement with quick close-ups of each of the three. Hélène says she’s bought chicken chasseur with mushrooms for dinner – “He loves sausage, you know, especially salami!” declares Françoise – yet later Hélène regrets they haven’t touched the fennel and red cabbage. “I’ve gone and lost my keys again!” she exclaims, apropos of nothing. The ongoing conversations have a patchwork quality, mixing earnestly related anecdotes with curious non-sequiturs. “I’d like to see you eat lemons,” Bernard confides to Françoise. “My lips are made for that,” she forthrightly replies. Alphonse’s meagre stabs at expressing affection to Hélène are ignored or diverted until Bernard and Françoise leave – they share some personal history, some intimacy, but at the first hint of conflict, Hélène announces she has to go out. And, indeed, despite her own invitation to Alphonse, she’s already arranged the rest of the night out with her close friend Roland de Smoke (Claude Sainval), a contractor avidly familiar with Boulogne-Sur-Mer’s ongoing efforts to rebuild itself post-war – much like Hélène and Alphonse’s awkward aspirations for themselves.
And Bernard’s, as well. He’s haunted by his service in Algeria. He served with another man from Boulogne-Sur-Mer, Robert (Philippe Laudenbach), who seems to have successfully moved on from those experiences back into the real world. But Bernard, and Robert, participated in the interrogation, torture and death of a young Algerian woman. She gave her name as Muriel – ironically, Bernard never believed (believes) that was her real name. Nonetheless, “Muriel” is the name he’s given to the entity in his brain, the memory he can’t expunge or grow past, the act he’ll never forgive himself for, even though he searches for the next thing to move on to, the next thing in his life he’ll value, the next person whose love will displace his shame.
Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée in “Muriel, or The Time Of Return .” credit: dvdclassik.com
This is another Alain Resnais film about history, and memory, and the realities we construct based on those remembered resources, whether they’re reliably true or altered to suit our larger, sometimes unconscious, purposes. Here there are characters of genuine integrity and honesty who find themselves overwhelmed with despair nonetheless, and characters who routinely dispense lies and betrayal as another kind of defensive, yet practical, survival mechanism. Resnais isn’t purposefully making things hard on the audience with editing tricks and narrative incongruities. He’s expressing, with film, across a period of time, how people just like us live day-to-day, and find reasons to like themselves, and find ways to solve recalcitrant recurring problems in their lives – that’s a disconcertingly simultaneous process if you’re not in the middle of it, or if you’re trying to express it to others. Boulogne-Sur-Mer is a sleepy northern French port, but inhabited by people who had two World Wars in their own backyard, and then, twenty years later, had to assess their own feelings about making war on French citizens, Algerian French citizens, who inexplicably wanted their independence from what seemed to be France’s benevolent hand.
We must decide for ourselves whether Hélène is a hopeful or futile figure in looking for love and a secure future. Alphonse is earnestly looking for the same things, but employs far different methods. Bernard tells Mom he’s visiting “Muriel,” but he’s actually seeing the very sweet Marie-Dominique (Martine Vatel) – dare we honestly hope that he can be saved by the love of a good woman? It all sounds like prosaic fodder for potboilers and soap operas, but this film is one of the touchstones for why stories like this are important in the first place. Hélène (Delphine) is an unreliable protagonist and narrator, saddled with debt, a problem with gambling and perhaps continually ignoring the one man in the film who genuinely loves her. Yet she’s (Delphine’s) the compass that grounds us in the flurry of Resnais’ insistent fragments of narrative. It’s she who, however flawed, sets the moral tone by which we measure the other characters, and we ache and lament with her, as a kindred soul, as we worry, with her, that things might not work out. Again.
Periscope In The Bathtub 