Director: Alain Resnais
Year: 1963
Country: France | Italy
Language: French
Subtitles: English
Length: 116 mins
Format: PAL
Colour: Colour
Aspect Ratio: 1.66: 1
Certificate: 12
Alternate Title: Muriel, Or The Time Of Return

Synopsis

If cinema has its equivalents to the master modernists of music, painting, or literature, then one of the tradition's foremost practitioners is undoubtedly Alain Resnais-and Muriel ou le Temps d'un retour represents one of his earliest, and greatest, triumphs. In Resnais' two preceding features (the legendary Hiroshima mon Amour and Last Year in Marienbad), the master filmmaker pioneered new ways of representing inner reality and emotion; but with Muriel, he merged the vicissitudes of his characters' personal pasts, and married them to the traumas of the political present- namely, the French war in Algeria.

The story of middle-aged Helene (portrayed by Detphine Seyrig, of Last Year in Marienbad, Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, and Akerman's Jeanne Dielman), an antique dealer located in the provincial port-town of Boulogne-sur-Mer, who resides amid her wares inside the same flat that serves as her business showroom. An old lover of Helene's comes to visit and soon takes up a more permanent residence within her life, despite the presence of a suspicious, tortured, and sexualised stepson who is haunted by a woman, a name, from his own past: "Muriel".

Scripted by Jean Cayrol, the co-writer of Resnais' landmark early short film Night and Fog, Muriel is one of the great "family films", and stands like a cinema landmark as one of the most complex and rewarding films of the 1960s.

Special Features

- New telecine of the film supervised by Alain Resnais. Anamorphic.
- New English subtitles in an exclusive translation.
- The original French theatrical trailer for the film, newly subtitled.
- 44-page booklet containing a new essay by writer B. Kite; another new essay about the film by writer Anna Thomgate; a short piece on the film by Henri Langlois; and a critical "scrapbook" containing excerpts by Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and more.