Muriel ou Le Temps d'un Retour (1963)

Recommended

France/Italy/West Germany

Feature Film

Original Title: Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour

Director: Alain Resnais

Writer: Jean Cayrol

Cinematographer: Sacha Vierny

Composer: Hans Werner Henze

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kérien, Nita Klein, Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée

The excellent Seyrig plays a widow, living with her step-son, who invites a former lover, whom she hasn’t seen for twenty-odd years, to visit her in her Boulogne home, but, unexpectedly, he also brings along his “niece” and a whole lot of memories, in Resnais’s third feature, an enigmatic, unsettling, and menacing examination of the organic nature of memory. Iain.Stott