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Muriel, or The Time of Return
Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour
Synopsis
Hélène, a widow, sells antiques from the apartment she shares with her stepson, Bernard. Bernard is haunted by his participation in the torture and murder of a young woman named Muriel while serving as a soldier in the war in Algeria. One the most powerful classics in Alain Resnais’ work.
Our take
From Left Bank director Alain Resnais, an overwhelming followup to Last Year at Marienbad, a rich, moving and nuanced drama of memory and history, personal and national.
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Awards & Festivals
Venice Film Festival
1963 | 2 wins including: UNICRIT Award
BFI London Film Festival
1963 | Winner: Sutherland Trophy
Cinemasparagus
Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée) says: “You never know what period you’ll wake up to in this place.” I pause personally not so much at “this place” as I do “wake up to”. Muriel, ou le Temps d’un retour [Muriel, or: The Time of a Return, 1963] is no dream-saga or cannot be so easily internalized as such regardless of Last Year at Marienbad — this is dedicated hardcore montage form confronting and abutting in certain prolongation Cocteau, materially.
Craig Keller
June 17, 2017
It can be considered [Mr. Resnais’] quintessential film. As revisited in Criterion’s excellent new Blu-ray transfer, made from a 2015 digital restoration, it also appears to be his greatest… In essence, “Muriel” is a series of ruptures — both for Mr. Resnais’s characters and within his film — that serve to dramatize the way in which war and colonialism can disrupt individual lives as well as conventional narratives.
J. Hoberman
August 25, 2016
Movie Morlocks
In Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963), the repressed past infiltrates the present like a fungal growth slowly inching across the frame…. Alain Resnais’ follow-up to Last Year at Marienbad (‘61), Muriel has a materialist, tactile sense of place, established through rapid montages of everyday objects, whereas Marienbad’s amorphous no-place was shot with languorous long takes.
R. Emmet Sweeney
August 16, 2016
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