Muriel (1963)

Saw Muriel, a challenging film that opens one a woman visiting an antiques store.  The banal dialogue plays out over a rapid-fire series of close-ups, of the proprietress smoking, a coffee maker bubbling, the woman crossing her ankles, a ring on a finger.  This is a disconcerting introduction to a disconcerting film.  The entire film feels like glimpses and missing reels from a different, longer film which is more coherent, but which is also perhaps more boring.

The plot of the film centers around the woman who runs the antique shop, her (maybe) ex-boyfriend, the boyfriend's current girlfriend, and her son.  The antiques owner and her son have both been impacted heavily by the recent Algerian war.  She missed her opportunity to marry her ex-boyfriend.  Obsessed with what could have been, she surrounds herself with the objects of the past, to preserve and dream.  Her son meanwhile, is haunted by the war, and obsessively collects documentary materials as "evidence".  Both are obsessed with the past, but the mother's obsession centers on what could have been while the son's centers on what was.

The themes of the film are interesting, but you need to pay very close attention to the film to avoid getting lost.  Many times there was a blink-and-you-miss-it shot, coupled with a sudden musical sting which indicates an important scene in a normal film, but here we're rapidly moving on and whatever it was that was dropped, I missed entirely!  After an hour or so of feeling confused and paying close close attention just to figure out what's going on, I got very tired.

The film is too difficult for me.  It's shot like a short story: full of little scenes and observations.  Unlike a short story however, we can't linger on the scene to understand it.  We're always rushing along to something else ergodic and evocative.  The same director directed Last Year at Marienbad, another film that was too inaccessible for me to enjoy very much.

So, this film got the better of me.  Under all of its strange editing, the story is relatively straightforward, but the editing is something to contend with.  This film may benefit from multiple viewings, or perhaps from none at all: the editing is all in the script, written by a poet.  It might be better to read than to view.