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Broken images in Resnais's Muriel

Most people who have seen Muriel seem to remember it less for its specific characters or themes, important though these are, than for a kind of overall lack of harmony on both a visual and a thematic level: a peculiarly dis-integrated and fragmented vision of people and places, without any firm centre of gravity. One of the factors which is most obviously responsible for this is the editing style of the film. In marked contrast to the stately lyricism of earlier films such as Hiroshima mon amour and L’Annee derniere d Marienbad, the cutting here is usually very fast. It is also often disorientating because it appears to follow neither a diegetic logic for instance, the brief insert shots of various streets and buildings in Boulogne which appear in the middle of the night-time sequence near the beginning of the film when Helene is bringing Alphonse and Frangoise back from the station nor the kind of subjective ’psychological’ logic of, for instance, the flashbacks to the woman’s past love affair in Hiroshima mon amour. Apparently aimless cutting from one character to another, or from inside Helene’s flat to the town outside, for instance, produces a curiously inconsequential effect, and an uncertainty in the viewer as to what s/he is meant to be looking for. And, finally, the disorientation is increased by the frequent dislocation of sound and image, as the dialogue from one shot is carried over to the next, where it acts as a jarring background to an entirely different image. The structure of the film’s narrative is, in a different way, equally fragmented and unbalanced. In the first place there is not one story but two (H616ne/Alphonse/Ernest; Bernard/Muriel) running alongside each other and to some extent pulling against each other: both concern a difficult relationship with the past, but the parallels and/or contrasts between them are not particularly straightforward. Secondly, within this overall double framework, we frequently find sudden shifts of interest to very minor characters, such as the man Bernard meets on the cliffs who is looking for a ’husband’ for his goat; and, almost at the very end of the film, the appearance of two new characters