France, 1963
Directed by Alain Resnais
With Delphine Seyrig (Hélène Aughain), Jean-Baptiste Thiérée (Bernard Aughain), Jean-Pierre Kérien (Alphonse Noyard), Nita Klein (Françoise), Claude Sainval (Roland de Smoke), Jean Champion (Ernest)
The first scene shows two women talking about furniture; one, standing with a coat on, is a customer spelling out her wishes while the other, half sitting on a piece of furniture, listens carefully while smoking a cigarette. It should have been a mundane scene in any other film, taken in simple shots and reverse shots. But in this case the editing presents a fragmented, jerky series of shots. Most of the time, the film would stick to this odd, staggered style relying on jump cuts, overlapping of events, or interrupted actions. The narration looks like a hesitant and confused development disclosing key elements haphazardly, an intriguing puzzle whose pieces do not readily find their places.
It actually suits the tormented temperaments of characters struggling to face reality and to come to terms with their histories. Most of them flounder under their flaws, failures, weaknesses, and wishes. This is the obvious case of the lead character, the seller in the first scene, Hélène Aughain, a middle-aged, chain-smoking, and hyperactive antiques trader, unable to stand idle and always chattering. She is anxious about her stepson, Bernard, who is back from a military service done in Algeria, which has just gained its independence from France, and does not work, and in fact does not seem to have any project, apart shooting streets of their native Boulogne-Sur-Mer and taking care of Muriel, whom he has never introduced to his stepmother, to her bewilderment. But she has compounded her natural nervousness by inviting Alphonse Noyard, seemingly an old friend who quickly turns out to be a former lover; the man arrives at Boulogne-Sur-Mer with Françoise, a nice young woman he claims is a niece; both settle rather awkwardly in Hélène’s apartment which she would readily leave to go out with her beau, Roland de Smoke, or to gamble her money away at the local casino.
Hélène’s apartment is singular: a labyrinthine place, it is crammed with any kind of furniture and decorative objects, nearly all of them for sale; it doubles in fact as a shop, the rooms being as many showcases. Bernard quips that with such an odd life, you cannot imagine what kind of furniture style you would see when you wake up in the morning. What is for sure is that it would belong to the past; Hélène thinks and moves inside a world shaped by the past and is actually rooted in the past; her reunion with Alphonse comes from an apparently compulsory, confused need to harp on the affair they had. Neither she or he really know how to handle their memories, which emerge only slowly and tentatively: the constant hesitation between the second person of the singular form – the French tutoiement – and the second person of the plural form – the vouvoiement – highlights the malaise.
This need to talk over the past has a preposterous edge, emphasized by the odd behavior of Hélène who finds it perfectly normal to leave Alphonse alone in her apartmentjust a few hours after he came in just to follow Roland; and her old companion proves to be cheeky and cavalier when it is clear that Françoise is in fact his girlfriend. It appears later, with the arrival of another traveler, Ernest, that Alphonse was pursuing a goal when he accepted to meet Hélène; but it remains hard to decipher what Hélène wants to achieve, apart from trying to understand better how things got wrong.
Hélène is not the only person to be obsessed with the past: in a remarkable parallel, Bernard is haunted by another meeting he had under dreadful circumstances. As he tells a friend as they watched 16 mm films of his spell in the army back in Algeria, he was compelled to take part in the interrogation, including rape, and murder of a young woman, the Muriel he is always looking around in the town. His absurd behavior also proves to pursue a goal.
Françoise at one point angrily yells that all this talk about the past is stifling. Indeed, the film, through dialogues going in round circles, when they do not lead to a disaster, and stuttering images, cast each of the Aughains as unable to recover from past traumas and sealed in their bubbles – an apartment, a few films – they always revisit for lack of better means – Hélène would explain that renting a commercial property is too difficult – and for lack of imagination and willingness – and Bernard is deeply unable to imagine a future. When staff from the local newspaper throw in the streets leaflets inviting the public to take part in a game about imagining the future, the anecdote stands as a cruel irony: despite Françoise’s protests, it is hard to forget whatever happened and whatever was done.
This past has a specific nature; beyond personal sentiments, it incorporates the wider political history and the horrors of war. Like “Hiroshima mon amour” (1959), “Muriel ou le temps d’un retour” grapples with the consequences of the bloody 20th century on the identities and memories of individuals, with an even greater and daring sense of the current affairs: to talk publicly about torture and violence against the civilians in the course of Algeria’s independence war just a few months after the peace deal, including by choosing the name of a victim as the film’s title, was remarkably brave. The wounds of World War Two were still raw: the cryptic talks about Alphonse and Hélène’s common past allude to the divisions in the French population at that time; the town where the events take place is a remarkable symbol: this northern port was carpet-bombed and most of what is shot is brand-new constructions.
It can be argued that by pursuing their goals, Alphonse and Bernard try to break free from the shackles of past, and more precisely from the choices they made, more or less willingly (absolutely not willingly in Bernard’s case). But their actions are highly contentious and look like a desperate effort to run away. Alphonse has always, it seems, hope to break off with his wife Simone, whom he married instead of Hélène, reckoning to grab any opportunity, imagining, unlike Bernard, a future; according to Ernest’s viewpoint, it is also part of his perennial effort to make a fresh start and to put behind him inglorious failures. When he jumps into a bus to flee the town, he just takes another chance but getting out of the frame could never be enough to find peace. Bernard would also fail to find it, as he also flees the place, in his case escaping the consequences of his vengeance against his former comrades in arms. Crime has been the only solution to overcome his pain, implying that the cycle of violence cannot be really challenged and stopped. The long shadow of the Algerian War, a colony where Alphonse used to live, or perhaps to hide, is set to poison the society for a long time.
The final shots show a woman entering Hélène’s flat that all the characters who took their Sunday meal there have left; she wanders, shy and surprised, through the empty rooms, calling Alphonse’s name; but her cries are doomed to be unanswered and the film ends with her standing alone in the empty place. She is probably Simone, Alphonse’s wife, Ernest’s sister and Hélène’s former rival, the key to Hélène’s spleen, Ernest’s hurried voyage, and Alphonse’s shenanigans. This is a key that appears too late to alter the course taken by Alphonse but it poignantly symbolizes the crushing weight, the unavoidable presence of a past entangling people forever. Meanwhile, the shock and despair a stunned Hélène feels, as she pays a visit to a couple she has seemingly decided to ignore for a long time (her past is decidedly even more complex and crueler than previously exposed), stands as the polar opposite of the beginning; now, she must acknowledges how harsh dealing with the past is and her wearied and worried looks suit the bitter, tragic vision the film has slowly built.