Reseñas de la crítica

Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée) says: "You never know what period you'll wake up to in this place." I pause personally not so much at "this place" as I do "wake up to". Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retour [Muriel, or: The Time of a Return, 1963] is no dream-saga or cannot be so easily internalized as such regardless of Last Year at Marienbad — this is dedicated hardcore montage form confronting and abutting in certain prolongation Cocteau, materially.

It can be considered [Mr. Resnais'] quintessential film. As revisited in Criterion's excellent new Blu-ray transfer, made from a 2015 digital restoration, it also appears to be his greatest... In essence, "Muriel" is a series of ruptures — both for Mr. Resnais's characters and within his film — that serve to dramatize the way in which war and colonialism can disrupt individual lives as well as conventional narratives.

In Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963), the repressed past infiltrates the present like a fungal growth slowly inching across the frame.... Alain Resnais' follow-up to Last Year at Marienbad ('61), Muriel has a materialist, tactile sense of place, established through rapid montages of everyday objects, whereas Marienbad's amorphous no-place was shot with languorous long takes.

Resnais's greatest film, Muriel can seem impossibly dense and portentous, its every phrase, object, and setting subject to (over)interpretation... With its disorienting ellipses, compressions, attenuations, and its obsessive repetitions, Muriel anticipates the "shattered time" of that other Resnais masterpiece 1968's Je t'aime, je t'aime but, without the latter's memory machine and use of flashbacks, can be all the more confounding.

As Susan Sontag argues in her book On Photography, a photograph, in general, is a deceptive means for remembering the past because it fosters a mentality which "looks at the world as a potential set of photographs," thus making its seeming passivity a deceptive form of aggression that taints one's memories of personal experience. By breaking spaces apart through editing and rejecting photography as a sentimental totem, Resnais works against this overriding tendency.

The script, by Jean Cayrol, spins a paranoid web of surprise reappearances and awkward encounters. Under Resnais's direction, the clunky reconstruction of the devastated French town is as central to the action as the characters are, creating a blank and bleak setting for their oblivious chitchat. In effect, he attributes two French generations' worth of neurotic, self-destructive behavior to the collective repression of history.

While Muriel is the work of a developing filmmaker and has a certain obviousness in some places, for example, a view of Bernard through a kaleidoscope that shows him fractured, it is nonetheless an honest film that accomplishes its mission to bear witness to some uncomfortable truths by helping its audience share the emotions of its vulnerable and sensitive protagonists. Better than a talking cure, Muriel offers a symbolic release. It's a beautiful and still urgently needed film.

A film at war with itself in a different way too - because Resnais can't quite bring himself to go full-experimental, and the actual (rather dull) story drags it down between the bursts of formal brilliance. Still among the ballsiest films I've seen, and the most ambitious; had it been a hit, the entire past half-century of movies might've been different.

This most signal "failure" of [Resnais'] career remains to this day a key work – its approach to character and narrative echoing in such otherwise different films as his "behaviourist" jape Mon Oncle d'Amerique (1980) and the Sacha Guitry-styled "filmed theatre" of Melo (1986). But what Muriel emphasises, like no other work of Resnais, is an engagement with 20th century French political history at its most unsettled and raw.

While Marienbad‘s illicitly exciting shame is appropriately opulent, Muriel‘s disaffected drifters (who are as cut off from romantic fantasies as they are from political consciousness) naturally find themselves lost in a wasted fluxland, a place where train schedules seem to change daily, massive fright ships run aground, and brand new buildings sit empty on crumbling coastline, waiting to slide into the sea.

It succeeds because the subjective point of view that was essential to Resnais' earlier films is now synthesized into an objective narrative that is not locked into one particular person's consciousness. Instead, it portrays the personal pain of several characters by focusing on exteriors: antique furniture crowding a dusty room, a half-smoked cigarette, an empty train station.

Alain Resnais creates a visual and thematic conundrum on the effects of war on the lives of three emotionally scarred survivors in Muriel... It's a cinematically groundbreaking, cryptic, and endlessly fascinating labyrinthine puzzle on memory and altered perception - an honest, yet challenging portrait of isolating guilt and the tragedy of survival.