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Like its immediate predecessors, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais’s Muriel is a living ghost story: Sontag-haired widow Delphine Seyrig runs an antique shop out of her own apartment in Boulogne, a seaside town reconstructed from a war-ravaged shell, and squabbles over the past with a reappeared lost love, while her stepson copes erratically with memories of atrocities committed as a solider in Algeria. Jean Cayrol’s stage-friendly screenplay and Sacha Vierny’s color cinematography render Boulogne more domestic than chic Marienbad and Hiroshima, but Resnais is still a modernist architect, discontinuous montage setting the characters adrift from their pasts and giving Muriel’s Proustian subtitle, “Time of Return,” a coldly ironic resonance.
