Word: muriel
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...MURIEL. Though it cannot match the gossamer style of Last Year at Marienbad, this latest work by France's Alain Resnais is an interesting failure, distinguished by the presence of beautiful Delphine Seyrig as a greying widow full of ineffable yearnings for yesteryear...
...MURIEL. France's Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Man Amour, Last Year at Marienbad) embarks on an original, ambitious but ultimately tiresome trip down memory lane, with Marienbad's luminous Delphine Seyrig in brilliant form as an aging widow who yearns to recapture a long-lost love...
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...
...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 lumière catharsis...
...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-à-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...