I know I saw Alain Resnais’s Muriel before this afternoon’s revelatory screening at the TIFF Lightbox. But that would have been around 1984 - yes, 35 years ago - in Bart Testa’s auterist Personal Visions film course at U of T, which I was auditing, having already taken it a year before with someone else. I remember almost nothing from it, and I certainly don’t remember liking it. I was probably too fixated on Marienbad, Hiroshima and Night and Fog to actually get that this was possibly his best film. I certainly didn’t think of it as was one of the best films I had ever seen, but I felt that very strongly today.

The TIFF Cinematheque programmer, James Quandt, agrees. “The purest expression of Resnais' central theme — how the present is the prisoner of the past, can never elude its snares — Muriel is singled out by many critics (correctly!) as the director's masterpiece: Jean-Louis Comolli called it "Resnais' most beautiful film," and Godard loved it so much he featured its poster on a wall in Two or Three Things I Know About Her. A middle-aged widow (Delphine Seyrig) living in an antique-stuffed apartment in Boulogne summons her ex-lover (Jean-Pierre Kérien) from Paris. As she attempts to recapture the (illusory) happiness of their past, her stepson (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée) is driven to violence in a futile attempt to extinguish the memory of his actions as a soldier in the Algerian War. Filmed with what has been called "hallucinatory realism," scored with unnerving songs by German composer Hans Werner Henze, and acted with stylized intensity by Seyrig, Muriel" surpasses [the] better-known Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour … a subtle, precise, and wrenching film" (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader).”

This is a beautiful film to watch  The shooting is impeccable, and the cutting makes the best use of jump cuts I may have ever seen. The streets, architecture, sets, props, and costumes are precisely deployed. And yet, the film is borders on impossible to watch, given the relentless alienation of the characters. Everyone seems to be in denial, dishonest and manipulative. Everyone seems unlikable to me, although it’s hard for anyone played by Delphine Seyrig (Hélène) to be entirely unlikable. 

Bernard, Hélène’s stepson, is creepy, possessed by his memories of “Muriel” (I’ll leave it at that), but the big surprise for me today is that he makes home movies throughout the film: home movies of the war, home movies of the present violence, etc. I don’t remember this at all, and it is a very useful feature for me given a big project I’m working on.
That’s not the only reason I loved this film, but it’s definitely one of them.