Muriel, or the Time of Return: a dreamy overview

Sept. 3, 2024 - Washington, DC

I can remember sixteen-digit codes from thirty-fuck years ago (see: Castlevania II) but I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. This may or may not explain why there don’t seem to be enough B vitamins on the planet to help properly etch Alain Resnais’ 1963 new wave psycho-drama Muriel, or the Time of Return—a syllabic tank battle of a name—into any of my more trustworthy brain cells. In short, I had to tulpa up the mnemonic “MOTTOR” to come to the rescue, and it has done so aplenty, mainly while discussing Muriel with the benthic cryptids that I tend to schlep with in those slender hours of the night that sort of seep into each other, that ephemeral opening act for the all too often bad idea sunrise.

“You like this flick a lot, eh?” asks one such cryptid. We were hunched darkly at a stoop outside of my apartment building, drinking gin out of coffee mugs and trying to avoid eye contact with those weird daybreak joggers that infest the sidewalks of the District of Columbia. 

“I’d friggin’ boink it if I could,” I say, dreamily. “Seen it damn near ten times since Memorial Day, whenever that was. You know, piecemeal and such.”

“Interesting… What’s it about?”

“No clue, brother.”

In fact, I do know what Muriel is about, but it’s impossible to offload it on someone without sounding like you’re making it up on the spot.

Roll film…

Here we are in Boulogne-sur-Mer, a small coastal city that received the Rotterdam treatment during World War II by, yeah, getting bombed into goo and then hastily resurrected via hard drab symmetry and glass. Its streets are wet and gray, often reflecting the neon lights of its boulangeries and shops. Boulogne’s inhabitants seem neither here nor there. “Where is downtown?” someone asks somebody later in the film. “You’re in it!” somebody responds.

We begin in Helene’s apartment, where everything has a literal price tag hanging off it. Most of the film takes place in this apartment, which basically plays hangar for the old English furniture, plateware, and bric-a-brac that Helene tirelessly tries to sell to whatever well-to-do couple comes knocking. People eat off plates and nestle into couches that are to be picked up by buyers “tomorrow”. Helene is about forty-five years old and mired in the trembles of some regrettable yesteryear. She seems to stay busy just to stay busy, either by peddling the contents of her apartment or by gambling (for all the wrong reasons).

If the manic montage of the film’s first sixty seconds doesn’t convince you that Muriel is going to be a bona fide weird flick, the introduction of Helene’s twitchy son Bernard, our protagonist (if only by default), will obliterate all doubt. Bernard, played by Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée—a sort of Madame Tussaud Scott Baio, is himself trapped in the past, albeit a more recent past. He was in the Algerian war, where he and four other soldiers interrogated and tortured to death a young woman named Muriel. (Bernard, who is courting an actual girl named Marie-Do, additionally, has an imaginary fiancé named, yeah, Muriel)… To better understand the appearance of Bernard, imagine the faces you see in the sand while on two hits of high-octane blotter acid. Strychnine smiles for miles…

Now we’re at the train station (nobody coming, nobody going) where Helene scoops up her old fling Alphonse and his ”niece” (discreet lover) Francoise. It becomes clear Alphonse and Francoise are broke. In fact, everyone in the film is broke (with the exception for Helene’s in-and-out lover, the kind-eyed Roland de Smoke, Boulogne’s very own Robert Moses). Alphonse is built like a former professional athlete: tall, sturdy, fifty-ish, but his charisma is betrayed his white jellybean of a voice: uncertain and higher-pitched than his appearance would suggest, a mismatch that pre-chews for us the fact Alphonse is an inveterate fraud, bridge burner, deadbeat, drama queen, and proto-fuckboy (and, as we will learn later, absent husband). On the other hand, the voice that comes out of the mouth of the very young and very pretty Francoise is much deeper than you’d expect. Francoise is an aspiring actress (thanks to Alphonse having summoned up just enough residual sway to get her a bit part in whatever wherever). She walks through the world like she’s strolling through one of those tubular glass walkways at high-profile aquariums, rubbernecking at her surroundings like a navy aviator and constantly remarking on every pleasure and displeasure. Francoise, we come to quickly realize, is basically a first-generation vapidista, her thoughts unoriginal, her gaze severe, her movements robotic, and it’s not at all surprising when she immediately takes to the equally synthetic-looking Bernard (to no avail), both of whom wouldn’t make it through the opening credits of Blade Runner.

If you watch Muriel out of the corner of your eye, it looks like an adaption of any given nouvelle roman, where allegorical figures sit around all day, sucking on vermouth and puffing endless cigs (there is mention of Winstons, Pall Malls, and Gaulioses within the film’s first five minutes) and wrangling with softcore trifles that they’ve patched up for themselves for no good reason other than to keep from capsizing in ennui—but, what’s this? the modernist mush shushes itself when, while watching his grainy films of French soldiers in Algeria with a friend, Bernard describes the details in which Muriel was tortured, primarily by another local boy, Robert, who Bernard still occasionally bumps into around town. “Robert takes a flashlight, uses it on her… Her mouth is foamy, she couldn’t talk if she wanted to… Robert lights a cigarette, walks back over to her… Muriel screams.” This is just a kiddie cup of the details of the living breathing nightmare that would be the last day of Muriel’s short existence, its hideousness amplified by the manner in which Bernard plainly narrates, as if he were reading off the back of a box of Frosted Flakes.

Helene and Alphonse spend much of the movie reminiscing, sometimes fondly, but usually with a low-grade accusatory air. They mentally tiptoe around each other—for all it takes is one wrong answer or one wrong question by one of them to send the other scuttling off to the next room to sulk and pout. Lots of “I should have never come here” or “I should have never asked you to come”, etc., etc… In the age of cellphones, this movie would be about thirty American seconds long, since these two surely would have long ago blocked each other into oblivion. But it’s 1963, and here they are in Boulogne-sur-Mer, up to their nostrils in regret and both getting by on nickels and trinkets. There’s mention of a letter that Alphonse long ago sent to Helene, confessing love and the desire for them to be together. Alphonse, as we learned in the first five minutes (when he says Francoise is his niece), is a liar. But there really was a letter. Alphonse had given the letter to a competing girl’s brother (why do that?) to drop in the mailbox, and that brother, Ernest, as it were, dutifully tossed said letter into a muddy river. We know all this because Ernest, on behalf of Alphonse’s now wife, Simone, comes calling and knocking. Ernest catches Helene, Alphonse, Bernard, Francoise, and various guests at dinnertime. He sings them a song (Dêja) before abruptly letting loose with why he trekked all the way out here to Boulogne-Sur-Mer: to gather Alphonse, of course. Time to go home, buddy boy, is the general message, before serenading the room with what he really thinks about Alphonse. Understandably, Alphonse is not into this. He grabs Ernest and the two men paw at each other and tussle awkwardly until Alphonse eventually acquiesces and agrees to go back to his wife, only to ditch Ernest (“I’m gonna get some smokes”) by ducking in and then discreetly out of a market and jumping on a bus to anywhere but home. This whole undoing of the stratus of bonhomie the film had been coasting along on proves to be the straw that punctured the camel’s aorta for Bernard. When Alphonse and Ernest start fighting, Bernard starts snapping pics (he spends the whole film armed with a muscular-looking camera— “collecting evidence”) and hollers at Francoise to grab his camcorder and start recording. She accidentally presses play on the thing instead of record and suddenly loud metallic sobbing/whimpering fumigates the room—the sound of Muriel, we assume, based on Bernard’s reaction. He begins crying his innards out and excuses himself out the front door and basically out of the film, but only after going full blown Menace II Society on Robert, the villain in Bernard’s constant mental stream of awful memories. “Robert, come down!” he hollers at Robert’s apartment building, a big beige Corbusierian Kleenex box. Robert pokes his head out of a window… “No, don’t come down!” a still weepy Bernard says, but, yeah, too late, Robert’s already ambled out of the shadows, so Bernard plugs him in the stomach. No more Robert. Helene hears the gunshot, and her motherly wile knows exactly what’s going on. “Bernard!” she says, jumping up and running over to the studio Bernard uses as a second home. No Bernard. She panics. Bernard appears in the doorway. Helene embraces him. He tells her he’s leaving. But you have no money, she says. It doesn’t matter, he replies, as he walks out of the frame and out of the movie.

Helene, too, leaves. She hurries down to the train station, looking for the train to Paris, presumably to snatch Alphonse, since she carries no luggage. The train to Paris no longer stops here, a bored station attendant tells her, it now only stops at the new station. Things change, he tells her.

It is unclear what happened to Francoise. Roland de Smoke takes her for a suspiciously long walk to “see the beach” at one point in the film. And we do know she’s grown tiresome of Alphonse’s antics. “When we get back to Paris, we’re done,” she tells him, to which he has no response.

The film ends with the introduction of Simone, Alphonse’s wife, as she goes to Helene’s apartment, its door ajar. “Hello?”, she says, entering the apartment. We follow her around via a handheld camera as she goes from room to room, calling out for Alphonse, but Alphonse, as we know, has hit the road, and there’s no sign of anyone else in the apartment either. Just a phalanx of dirty dishes, empty brut bottles, and some flowers that are a little droopier than they were the last time we saw them. Simone takes it all in, does the math, exits the apartment. FIN. The cinematic tinkerdom (“Look, ma, I’m makin’ a movie!”) ebbs here at the caboose of the film and this final scene does well to line up the film’s previous 115 minutes or so and wallop you in the chest with the whole big thing.

According to the script, Muriel takes place over two weeks in late September/early October. The only indication of time passing at all is that the characters are sometimes dressed differently than they were in the previous scene, and of course the occasional beddy-bye.

I’ve seen a lot of stupid-looking words, but nothing could have prepared me for “Fantabulous”, and yet I feel that’s the best descriptor for the outerwear featured in Muriel. Bernard bikes around town in a cyberpunky raincoat/windbreaker that you’re more likely to see on Korben Dallas, meanwhile Alphonse and Helene putter about draped in half the African Savannah.

The musical score of Muriel will drown out the most inveterate popcorn crunchers. Violins and an electric organ jump out of nowhere. It sounds like a bad day at the office for the Kronos Quartet—angry strings duking it out with menacing keys. Occasionally there’s opera. And then Ernest’s Dêja.

The movie’s real star is the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer itself. Historically, this area is where England (a mere 25 miles north) plays footsies with France. A region both ancient and modern on the dot, which, sure, is half of Europe (see: World War I and II), but it seems almost caricature here: one scene we are in Orbit City, and the next it’s Middle Earth.

Joining the ranks of Zazie Dans le Metro and Red Desert and Robocop 2, Muriel has become one of the default flicks I put on to sort of flicker in the background while I heat up leftovers at the homestead or to play on the boob tube at the bar. “What in the name of all that’s holy are we watchin’, guy?” asks a customer, as Alphonse wipes shandy bubbles from his mustache and troubleshoots with his copy of Le Monde. “Ah, it’s this real neat French flick called, eh, shit,” I say, gesticulating like a maced chimp. “Any chance you can flip over to, hell, anything else at all?” they ask. “I don’t think so,” I tell them. “Maybe later.” After all, yeah, things change.