Too Much Remembered

Muriel, for all its flaws, is another absorbing exercise in style by Director Alain Resnais, master hand of the new French cinema. Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which wove past and present into a breathless idyl snatched from the ashes of war, was followed by the romantic, enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad. Now, in Muriel, Resnais plunges into the labyrinthine corridors of memory, suggesting much, saying little, rarely glancing behind to see whether his audience is keeping up with him--as not much of it will.

Filmed in blatant color (plenty of raw sienna) in the booming channel city of Boulogne, Muriel delights the eye chiefly in the sentient beauty of Marienbad's Delphine Seyrig. She arrestingly portrays a frightened, fortyish widow who invites her former lover to a reunion after a separation of 22 years. A freeloading weakling and barfly, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kerien) arrives from Paris accompanied by a young actress he introduces as "my niece." The girl quickly attaches herself to the widow's melancholy stepson, recently returned from the war in Algeria. Soon the unlikely quartet is caught up in an orgy of reminiscence.

Eager to embrace the past, the widow keeps only tenuous links to the here and now. Her apartment has become an antique shop in which everything is for sale. "Be careful with these dishes--they are sold," she warns her dinner guests. Every evening she compulsively gambles away all she owns at the local casino. She spurns a stolid admirer who is in the demolition business, destroying the old to make way for the new in the "martyred city" of Boulogne. Most troubled of the four is the widow's stepson, who cannot forget (nor can any conscientious Frenchman, Resnais seems to suggest) the part he took in the torture and ultimate death of a young Algerian girl named Muriel. The boy's awful recollections are hidden away in recordings and photographs, part of his weird search for a sort of son et lumiere catharsis.

Thus everyone shares time's cruel burden, trapped by the memory of transient pleasures impossible to renew, tragic errors impossible to erase. Only the nubile "niece," played with a fine flair by Nita Klein, escapes untouched for now. "I've had enough of this dump with all its memories," she snaps, and takes herself right back to Paris.

Swiftly cutting from person to person, place to place, Resnais' camera leapfrogs through time, often with stunning effect. Even more daringly, he lets dialogue overlap--voices from one scene continue into the sequence following, or precede images yet to come. Sometimes confusing, the device at its best is a vivid projection of the simultaneity of events.

Resnais fails at last because of his very strengths: a thin narrative collapses under the weight of technical virtuosity. He offers shadow instead of substance, a clutter of seemingly irrelevant minutiae (a shrill soprano on the sound track, doors endlessly opening and closing, limbo shots of notes being written, reams of small talk, and provocative clues to heaven-knows-what) instead of reality's elusive core. "When you get right down to it, it's a trite story," remarks Actress Seyrig to her long-lost vis-`a-vis. A master without a theme, Resnais has claimed that his films are made to be felt, not understood. But Muriel, with characters who are basically tiresome folk, is more apt to pique curiosity than to stir the senses or touch the heart.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.