Muriel

Boulogne-sur-Mer, martyr city. "You never know what period you'll wake up to in this place." The widow (Delphine Seyrig) runs an antiques shop and gambles at the local casino, her stepson (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée) is just back from Algiers. Her old lover (Jean-Pierre Kérien) comes to visit, a failed restauranteur full of false claims, among the claims is the young niece (Nita Klein) who's really his mistress. Around them a thousand fragments, an unsettled consciousness visualized in cubist ripples—a scene splintered into a dozen rapid shards, inserts that go from day to night and back, virtually subliminal signposts. "We often misjudge distances." Alain Resnais back with Night and Fog's poet, Jean Cayrol, and the weight of memory. Souvenirs amid ruins, melted silverware and white ash linger in the heroine's psyche, so does the wartime date not kept. "Mais c'est notre histoire!" A more recent war haunts the returning soldier, who recounts the torture and killing of the eponymous Arab girl while 8mm flickers of cavorting French forces fill the screen. "A documentary?" "Worse." A pellucid approach to color, to display windows illuminating a darkened street and unwarming sunlight on industrial shores. The ingénue waiting to be discovered, the mussel-gatherer searching for a nanny goat, the building sliding off its foundation. (The demolition engineer has a joke about modern architecture, "new, empty, and we're waiting for it to collapse.") Time is a burden but it's also a jolly chanson for after dinner, "Déjà." One of Resnais' most beautiful constructions, complex experimentation and crystalline emotion meeting in Seyrig's piercing veracity under powdered hair and lumpy sweaters. "Cada persona es un mundo." The advanced style is best appreciated by Losey and Roeg, De Palma in Casualties of War expands the legionnaire's trauma. Cinematography by Sacha Vierny. With Claude Sainval, Jean Champion, Laurence Badie, Philippe Laudenbach, Jean Dasté, Martine Vatel, Françoise Bertin, and Julien Verdier.