Alain Resnais is one of the elements of the Rive Gauche or Left Bank which is associated with the French New Wave. The topography of his films is lined with habitual themes like memory, forgetfulness, nostalgia, illusion and a pre-occupation with the past.
His unconventional mode of filmmaking can be seen as simultaneously ingenious and irritating. The subject matter, on more than one occasion, never fails to baffle, perplex, confound and bewilder. He clearly isn’t a stickler for rules, with unpredictability in terms of story and editing being his strong suit. Two of his films, ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ and ‘Muriel or The Time of Return’ were both screened at Prithvi Theatre.
In a magisterial resort chateau at an undisclosed location, a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) and a woman (Delphine Seyrig) meet. The man is convinced that he’s met a woman the previous year, fallen in love with her and made plans to run away with her. The woman claims that they’ve never met and that she doesn’t remember any of it. A third man (Sacha Pitoëff), presumably the woman’s husband, is also makes his presence felt
So really, is he telling the truth? Or is she simply denying the affair? And is any of it real at all? Amidst a hazy storyline, we’re not given any concrete evidence to work with, all the while wondering along with the protagonists, what is real and what isn’t.
The man’s voiceover narration is in past tense as the scene unfurls before us in the present. Scenes leap from the present to the supposed past and back, staccato-like yet not without a lyrical quality. It’s successful in suggesting the disconnection and abstraction that pervade the people and the drowsy atmosphere in the film.
The camera work of Sacha Vierney is lustrous as it swimmingly sweeps down in black and white, with long tracking shots.
Majority of the film is blanketed by the plangent expanse of organs, the kind of dramatic music that works very well with a horror movie.
Having aged over forty years, the film that was once heralded as stupefying is now bordering on unfathomable and frustrating. And is this film simply a study in style and mastering the fine art of being ambiguous or a rendition of art way ahead of its time that’s simply aged?
‘Muriel or the Time of Return’ revisits the theme of war, after his Resnais’ first film, ‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’.
We’re introduced to Helene (Delphine Seyrig), a middle-aged widow and antique saleswoman and her step- son Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée) who live in the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Helene runs into her old love Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien). As Helene is haunted by past experience with Alphonse and Bernard is haunted by his experiences from the war in Algiers, where he had partaken in the event of torturing and killing a girl.
Unlike his previous two cinematic operas, cinematography by Sacha Vierney foregoes black and white for colour which somehow doesn’t have the same effect as Resnais hoped it would. The film conducts itself in a linear manner, but is just as complex and not as bewildering as Marienbad.
Architecture is manipulated to make the presence of passing time known. Time is a stentorian presence that conjoins Marienbad and Muriel. In the former, there doesn’t seem to be a well-defined sense of time or place, whereas in the latter it is the opposite. However in Muriel, a personal love story between two people is juxtaposed against the effects of the repugnancy of war. It seems to inquire how a person can finally seek closure and move on from the past. The film also helped shed light on the Algerian War of Independence.
Dealing with recurring themes and motifs, you can say that he makes the same film over and over again. In a world where movies are told in a linear narrative, and have some amount of predictability, Resnais’ films may seem slightly corroded and weary to watch, yet undoubtedly each one has its subtle nuances, tones and artistic execution that make them memorable.
For Prithvi Theatre Notes, December 2011 :
http://www.prithvitheatre.org/uploads/pdfs/PTNotes_December_201_1322204635.pdf
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