Muriel

JAKE: People grow old, things change, people walk through the streets of a city. They open doors, prepare meals, and suddenly they're in the bathroom and everything's green.

JUDY: Oh, the film is far more complex and complicated than Hiroshima, Mon Amour and alive with a contemporary character and drama so sadly lacking in L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad; this Resnais film is perhaps "special" in its appeal.

JAKE: The buildings' stark shells enwrapping the fervid human dramas unrolling in moments of lightning-fast perception before my very eyes so that I can scarce catch my breath between sobs...

JUDY: Consider Helene, portrayed at least with warmth and flexibility by Delphine Seyrig. Unlike Emmanuelle Riva--the Woman in Hiroshima, Jake--Miss Seyrig speaks not only to the audience but to the other characters on the screen as well. Our viewpoint never manages to penetrate the inscrutable consciousness.

JAKE: Helene's hands, care-worn like the face of my mother, tenderly carressed by Sacha Vierny's lens...how can I forget them, ever? Whenever I hurt someone I will look at her hands and see Helene's hands receding down the darkling corridors of my memory.

JUDY: Please. You're hurting my hand.

JAKE: Ooo, sorry.

JUDY: That's quite all right. And surely you mean lenses, Jake. What a superb melange de style Vierney achieves utilizing quasi-fish-eye, extreme wide angle, kaleidoscopic, wide angle standard focal length, and long lens shots. Shots that delicately commingle the chameleon pastel shades and confirm Resnais's mastery of montage and complete command of mise en scene. Surely, one of the great auteurs.

JAKE: Oh, and the pictures are so pretty, too. Gosh, I love the way Resnais shows the past, the all-pervading past pervading everything. Time is so really important to everything. Why, we couldn't exist if it weren't for time! Because when else could anything happen?

JUDY: He does bring to the screen his own particular blend of past and present, his own perceptive consciousness of the mind and its experience, his own harsh juxtaposition of memory and fact, of yearning and fulfillment. How ludicrous to call Muriel "essentially false, an elaborate piece of mystification" as that aging enfant terrible of British film criticism, John Russell Taylor, recently did.

JAKE: To me, deep in my heart, Muriel is a never-seen objective correlative for the tortured flaming creature with burned breasts that was the Algeria of so many long agonized bloody strife-torn years of horrible rending aux abois war. And that creepy music, it made my skin crawl.

JUDY: I hardly think that is the way to refer to the music of the famous teutonic composer, Hans Werner Henze, especially when sung by the theremin-toned Rita Streich. Although not up to her performance in Die Zauberflote (Decca DL 9932, monaural, at the Coop), Miss Streich surely improves the score--which could stand as a musical composition by itself, even while it serves Resnais's most specific dramatic intentions.

JAKE: Oh, the drama of it all! From the bottomless pit of my heart, I will urge each and everybody I know to see this lambent, coruscating, sinewy, Proustian, visually exacerbating film. All it needs to be perfect is Rita Tushingham.