Muriel (film) - Themes

Themes

At a press conference at the Venice Film Festival in 1963, Resnais said that his film depicted "the malaise of a so-called happy society. ...A new world is taking shape, my characters are afraid of it, and they don't know how to face up to it." Muriel has been seen as part of a 'cinema of alienation' of the 1960s, films which "betray a sudden desperate nostalgia for certain essential values". A sense of disruption and uncertainty is constantly emphasised, not least by the style of jump-cutting between events. "The technique of observing absolute chronology while simultaneously following a number of characters and treating even casual passers-by in the same manner as the main characters gives rise to a hallucinatory realism."

At the centre of the film lies the specific theme of the Algerian war, which had only recently been brought to its troubled conclusion, and which it had hitherto been almost impossible for French film-makers to address in a meaningful way. (Godard's film Le Petit Soldat had been banned in France in 1960 and was not shown until 1963. Also in 1960, Resnais had been one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121, in which a group of intellectuals had declared opposition to the French government's military policy in Algeria.) At the midpoint of Muriel, a sequence of newsreel with Bernard's voiceover commentary presents the inescapable 'evidence' of an incident of torture which continually haunts Bernard and explains his obsession with the girl he calls Muriel.

This "moment of truth" which has not been confronted is echoed in different forms in the past lives of each of the other main characters. Hélène has been unable to overcome her sense of loss and betrayal from a past love affair; Hélène, Alphonse and Bernard all carry troubled memories of having lived through and survived World War II; and Boulogne itself presents the image of a town uneasily rebuilding itself over the devastation that it suffered in that war. Hélène's apartment, with its half-finished décor and ever-shifting furniture, and seen by the camera only as a disjointed collection of spaces until the film's final shot, offers a metaphor for the traumatised brain which is unable to put itself in order and see itself whole.