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Critique of Muriel - 4 Stars!
By James Travers
Featured on filmsdefrance.com
Published: 2002
Widely regarded as one of Alain Resnais’ greatest films, Muriel is perhaps the most perfect distillation of the themes of time, place and memory which dominate most of the director’s works. Noticeably less abstract that his previous two films, which cover similar ground, (Hiroshima mon amour and L’Année dernière à Marienbad), Muriel is set in a world we can all recognise, with characters we can all identify with. As a consequence, the film has an immediacy and relevance which possibly his earlier films (whilst still being undisputed masterpieces) possibly lacked.
Muriel is mainly concerned with two characters – a lonely middle-aged widow, Hélène (magnificently portrayed by Delphine Seyrig), and her traumatised step-son Bernard. Both characters live in a present that is strongly influenced by the past and both expend a great deal of time and energy in trying to alter that past. Whilst Hélène’s past has become a fantasy (as she discovers when she compares notes with her ex-lover Alphonse), Bernard’s past, more recent, is a living nightmare, scarred by memories of the atrocities he committed whilst serving in Algeria (including the brutal torture of a girl named Muriel). Bernard attempts to alter his past by repeatedly watching a film of his army life he made whilst in Algeria and by gathering “evidence” to justify his current state of mind. He is no more successful than his step-mother, whose last-ditch bid to return to the past is ultimately thwarted when she turns up at a disused railway station.
As in many of Resnais’ films, the location plays a paramount role in the film. Here, the town of Boulogne-sur-mer is the perfect setting for a film where past memories intrude continually on the present consciousness. In the haste to rebuild the town after the devastating bombings of World War II, the town planners created an uncomfortable melange past and present, picturesque old streets surrounded by ugly new development. No town could better encapsulate the film’s meaning nor provide a more stark visual metaphor. Like the confused memories of Hélène and Bernard, Boulogne is a place where past and present sit uncomfortably side-by-side.
Muriel is an immeasurably fascinating and complex film which requires at least three or four viewings to appreciate its genius and subtlety. Resnais is magnificently served not just by his cast of actors (who give fine performances throughout) but also his technical crew. Beautifully filmed (this being Resnais’ first colour film) and cleverly scripted by Jean Cayrol (who previously worked with Resnais on his documentary short Nuit et brouillard), Muriel is unquestionably one of the most extraordinary cinematic achievements of the Twentieth Century.
Muriel
By Jack Gattanella
Featured on film-forward.com
Published: March 20, 2007
This curiosity is directed by one of that ragtag group of critics from the Cashiers du Cinema. After his first two theatrical features, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais continued to wipe away conventions. According to the interview accompanying this DVD, his third film is broken up in a five-act structure, but the middle chunk is jumbled around and fragmented even with its underlining linear storylines. Unlike Resnais’ other Nouvelle Vague counterparts like Truffaut and particularly Godard (due to the numerous jump cuts here), it’s never as compelling as it could have been because of the detachment from the characters. The chopped and elliptical storytelling may seem years ahead of its time, but the editing style trumps absorbing characterizations.
A widow, Hélène (Delphine Seyrig, who disappears convincingly into playing an older woman), runs an antiques shop and is paid a visit by an old lover, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien). Hélène and Alphonse have a history together, this much is certain, a wartime romance of which their memories aren’t very reliable (at least at first). Accompanying him is his “niece,” Françoise (Nita Klein). Joining them for an awkward dinner is Hélène’s Algerian war vet stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée). After this reunion, Alphonse subsequently decides to stick around in Hélène’s sleepy coastal town, to which Nita complies. Throughout, Resnais emphasizes the power of memories that are shared or completely made up. As Alphonse says, “Every person is a private world.” Or viewed another way, all the characters are lying, with some being better at it than others.
In the beginning, the very first shots go by at a fast and abrupt clip, at least 30 shots in the first 30 seconds, more or less, revealing Hélène’s apartment and a customer at her door, whose identity becomes, like the rest of the film, clearer at the end. Resnais’ unpredictable method has its moments of peaked interest, but the valleys are hard to bear because of his reluctance to film such everyday affairs more clearly as opposed to all over the place.
Maybe Resnais is testing the audience as well as himself to see if he and the editors can pull off putting a mishmash of images together to prove a point about what serves as a collective memory. Occasionally he is successful. Maybe the most effective and emotional scene comes when Bernard shows footage of French soldiers relaxing on a field in Algeria to a friend. His voiceover about what happened to the often mentioned but never seen Muriel suddenly takes on the same power of style and substance from Resnais’ other work (Marienbad). (Remarkably, Muriel predates the groundbreaking The Battle of Algiers by one year in its corrosive reflection of that war’s legacy.) But moments like these are fleeting, and by the time the dramatic momentum builds in the last act, where an old “friend” of Alphonse arrives unexpectedly and lays the truth down about the love affair(s) decades before, it’s almost too little and too late.
Muriel
Reviewed by Judge Jesse Ataide (Retired)
Featured on DVDVerdict.com
Published: June 4th, 2007
The Charge
“Modern life is fragmented.”
—Alain Resnais
Opening Statement
In his dual review of 85-year-old director Alain Resnais’s 1963 film Muriel and his latest, internationally acclaimed festival hit Private Fears in Public Places, contentious film critic Armond White proclaims Resnais “the most influential yet least familiar filmmaker from that period Philip Lopate called ‘the heroic age of moviegoing.’” Two of his films have been Criterion-approved (those would be Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour) and another has come to represent for some French cinema at its most pretentious (that, unfortunately, would be Last Year at Marienbad). But for whatever reason, his follow-up film Muriel ou Le temps d’un retour (Muriel or the Time of the Return) has never developed much of a name for itself despite many considering it to be the equal of those more well-known films. Some even proclaim it Resnais’s crowning achievement as a director, which is very high praise indeed.
The most obvious reason for Muriel’s relative obscurity is undoubtedly its complexity. Despite Resnais’s stated desire to anchor his film in realism, he inevitably filters it through his unique cinematic sensibility, complete with disorienting, lightning-flash montages and a fragmented approach to narrative. In short, it comes off as anything but realistic. And yet, despite its aesthetic and narrative intricacy, digging into Resnais’s film reveals a rather dazzling attempt to depict the complexities of modern living.
Facts of the Case
Resnais has said that Muriel’s narrative is “…a film in facets, a film made of mosaics” and as such, reviewers (most certainly including this one) has found summarizing the film a thankless, nearly impossible task. But some basic plot points: the film takes place in Boulogne-sur-Mer (a port city on the northern coast of France) and begins when, on a whim, an aging antiques dealer named Hélène (Delphine Seyrig, Last Year at Marienbad) asks an old flame, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien) to come visit her for several days. Alphonse readily accepts the invitation, but much to Hélène’s surprise, he shows up accompanied by his niece, a beautiful, enigmatic young actress named Françoise (Nita Klein, Total Eclipse) who is later reveled to be his mistress.
What is intended as a happy reunion quickly sets itself up as an extremely messy domestic situation, particularly in light of the increasingly erratic behavior of Hélène’s stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée), who has recently returned to France upon finishing his military service in Algiers. As this quartet begins to interact with each other it becomes clear that all are playing games, each attempting to mask a secret from their past. Most of the film revolves around unraveling these secrets over a two-week period, and how it prevents the characters from connecting with each other, and perhaps most importantly, stops them from moving on with their lives.
The Evidence
In an interview at the time of Muriel’s release, Resnais admitted that the film came about as a change of direction after the delicate and diaphanous memory puzzles Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Wanting to deal directly with issues looming large in the French psyche in the early 1960’s—namely, France’s role in the Algerian war for independence and the lingering after-affects of World War II—Resnais began to develop a story with novelist Jean Cayrol, a concentration camp survivor who is probably best known today for the screenplay he wrote for Resnais’s Night and Fog.
Despite beginning with the intention of realism, Resnais and Cayrol’s film cannot be described as a “realistic” film in the traditional sense, and indeed, Muriel, at least on an aesthetic level, seems as far removed from “reality” as any of Resnais’s early films. But this stems from Resnais and Cayrol’s conviction that “a classic film cannot translate the real rhythm of modern life,” which leads to what could be described as the cinematic equivalent of cubism, a painting technique that had revolutionized painting early in 20th century. Cubism was meant to depict an object from multiple perspectives simultaneously; Resnais attempts the same concept with his camera, most noticeably in the several rapid-fire montages found throughout the film. But this approach also plays itself out in more subtle manner, particularly in regards to how the narrative unfolds. For even though many critics and reviewers have noted how the film contains a distinct five-act structure, each act is broken up into the so-called little facets and mosaics, which manifest themselves in many different ways. These include shots of objects and locations that seem to have no direct bearing on what is being spoken about, conversations that bleed into the following scene long after actions have elapsed, conversations that begin before they show the characters who are actually speaking, and conversations that recall past events but are presented as if they are part of the present (needless to say, with all this talking the language barrier can give an English-speaking viewer an acute headache).
The purpose of all this movement, both with the camera and with the characters (who are depicted as constantly dashing about, whether it be throughout the town in general or in Hélène’s cramped apartment), is to demonstrate a group of people who are running circles around things that the things that they wish to leave unspoken. One of the main themes of the film is the clash of the past with the present, and how the disconnection creates a prison-like emotional wasteland for each of the characters. For Françoise, it is the inability to let go of her relationship with Alphonse, for Alphonse it his habit of inventing a fictional background for himself to give the impression of accomplishing great things in his life. Hélène, the most flighty and seemingly emotionally distraught of all the main characters, is dealing with issues from the past that remain the most mysterious (though it has something to do with her failed love affair with Alphonse many years before); most harrowing of all is the emotional breakdown Bernard suffers because of his involvement in the torture and death of a young Algerian girl—the mysterious Muriel of the title whose unseen ghost hangs over the film like a burial shroud.
What keeps Muriel grounded (and watchable) amid all of this intellectual and cinematic experimentation is the performances, namely the frazzled, distraught central performance of Hélène, played by the ever-magnificent Delphine Seyrig. Surely one of the least well-known of all great international actresses, an abridged list of the some of the visionary directors she worked with during the 1960s and 1970s boggles the mind: François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Demy, Joseph Losey, Chantal Akerman, Fred Zinnemann, photographer Robert Frank and others. And anybody who has witnessed Seyrig’s unexpectedly sensual, nearly wordless performance as the chic, Chanel-clad young woman in Last Year at Marienbad will be shocked by her dowdy, verbose and extremely hyperactive turn as the aging Hélène—she’s virtually unrecognizable. The other actors also perform admirably, particularly Nita Klein’s confident but conflicted performance—when she shrieks near the end of the film that she has “had enough of this dump that feeds on memories,” its the closest the film ever comes from breaking out of its detached, attempted objectivity into a place of vulnerability and emotional devastation.
Koch Lorber has to be thanked for helping remedy what has been an awful dearth of Resnais titles available to Region 1 viewers. Considering that only about a half dozen of his films are currently available on DVD (and several of those, including Marienbad, have been long out of print and now fetching upwards of $100 per disc), any new opportunity to see one of his films is to be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, even if the image quality certainly superior to the muddy-looking VHS copy I watched years ago, it is still found wanting—very soft and vaguely hazy at times, it really emphasizes the very 1970s color palette of browns, tans and yellow, and not in a good way. As for the audio track, it’s rather difficult to tell if the quality is lacking or if it is simply Resnais’s complex use of sound and conversation that can make for a challenging aural experience (most likely it’s a combination of both). But extremely appreciated are the yellow subtitles included in this release—I remember struggling with the VHS copy I watched as the white subtitles had a tendency to disappear into the image on an annoyingly frequent basis.
Extras include the original theatrical trailer, and more importantly, an insightful and all-too-brief interview with Resnais scholar François Thomas. And even if it’s nitpicking, if there’s a film screaming out for a scholarly booklet so often found in Criterion releases it’s certainly Muriel. But when it comes down to it, Muriel is a film that demands (and requires) multiple viewings, and I’m just grateful there’s finally an opportunity to do so.
Closing Statement
While I personally respond more deeply and intensely to Resnais’s earlier, more poetic masterpieces Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour (both are always included near the top of any favorite films list I ever compile), Muriel is yet another endlessly fascinating, relentlessly challenging film that I relish and it receives pride of place in my DVD collection.
The Verdict
Not guilty.
Muriel, or the Time of Return
By Doug Cummings
Featured on filmjourney.org
Published: March 22nd, 2007
Alain Resnais has had difficulty winning an American audience, partly due to the unavailability of much of his work here, and partly due to the avant-garde nature of his first two features (Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad), which caused many US critics to dismiss him as a filmmaker interested in “form over content.” James Monaco offers a fine riposte to one such critic, Pauline Kael, in his book on Resnais:
“Really, Alain Resnais’s films, far from being the complicated and tortuous intellectual puzzles they are reputed to be, are rather simple, elegant, easily understood–and felt–investigations of the pervasive process of imagination. It doesn’t even take much imagination to enjoy them. All that is necessary is an understanding that we are watching not stories, but the telling of stories. Far from being a forcible, new intellectual twist, this is simply a little refreshing honesty. In life, we watch stories, in film we always, perforce, must watch the telling. There is no other way, so why not admit it within the limits of the movie?”
Resnais’ third feature, widely considered to be one of his best films (perhaps even his masterpiece), Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963), has finally been released on DVD, and its colorful, character-based immediacy might surprise those only familiar with his ethereal, black-and-white tone poems. Not that Muriel isn’t adventurous in its formal construction, visually and aurally skipping through its characters’ everyday lives as if on intermittent play, but it tells a straightforward story with fully-formed characters. Although it can take several viewings to grasp the details of the narrative (it took me three), the film’s staccato, elliptical construction ultimately seems completely natural and deeply compelling.
The script was written by Jean Cayrol (who died in 2005), the French poet and concentration camp survivor who wrote the narration for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955). Muriel is set in a specific place, Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France, and it takes advantage of the city’s contrasting architecture in the early ’60s, when new high rises and cafes stood next to streets and ruins still bearing the scars of World War II. Resnais has offered architectural metaphors at least since he envisioned the BibliothËque nationale as a giant brain in All the Memories of the World (1956), and here he utilizes Boulogne to underscore the tension between France’s troubled past and present makeover.
Muriel was one of the first French films to address atrocities committed during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-’62); aggressive censors ensured that previous and future films–Resnais’ Statues Also Die (’53), Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (’60), The Battle of Algiers (’66), and many others–had difficulty being released. The film is without a doubt timely today in the US as the nation alternates between coming to grips or flat-out ignoring its own war of occupation and reports of human rights abuses. “Algeria is all over for us,” a shady ex-soldier named Robert (probably a member of the OAS) says regarding such reports. “The loudspeaker cars, the speeches, the leaflets, all gone. We’re in France. The main thing is for every Frenchman to feel alone, scared. He’ll erect barbed wire around his little ego. He doesn’t want trouble, so let’s keep him guessing [about what happened].”
The story is simple, but there are so many characters–some only briefly glimpsed–that making sense of their connections can be daunting. There are two primary romantic triangles that mirror one another in various ways, but each character seems to have at least two potential suitors. One triangle centers on Hélène (Delphine Seyrig), an attractive, middle-aged woman who re-initiates contact with her ex-lover, Alphonse, an ex-WWII soldier who arrives with his actress girlfriend (ostensibly his niece), FranÁoise. Hélène sells antiques and is a compulsive gambler; she also has a casual boyfriend, Roland, who demolishes buildings in Boulogne and salvages the parts.
The other major triangle centers on Hélène’s stepson, Bernard, an ex-soldier just back from Algeria, who agonizes over his participation in the torture of a woman named Muriel (whom he bizarrely claims he’s dating but is never seen). He also has a girlfriend named Marie-Do, who is vaguely connected to Robert, the shady ex-soldier quoted above.
The narrative has been described as “pure soap opera,” but the treatment and execution–Monaco’s “telling of the story”–is rife with complex associations and a multitude of details, not the least of which is a character whose importance emerges near the end of the film and helps clarify (partially reformulating) the narrative. The plot is structured around five acts and three pivotal dinner scenes; the first introduces the characters, the second highlights the theme of building a new society on a troubled past (more on this in a bit), and the third ignites the climactic confrontation. In between, the film skips through the lives of the characters, offering teasing moments and particles of events.
Throughout, however, the theme of how each character relates to his or her sense of time and memory remains paramount. (Critic John Ward’s Bergsonian analysis of the film is particularly illuminating in this regard.) The duplicitous Alphonse exploits the past to manipulate the present; Hélène clings to the past by selling antiques and escapes the present (she’s always forgetting things) by living for the future (gambling); Bernard is confined to the past entirely; etc. Only Franoise seems to live in the present from moment to moment, and at one point, she shrieks, “I’ve had enough of this dump that feeds on memories!” The characters in the film–like the town of Boulogne–are in constant motion, psychologically shifting between past, present, and future, and moving about town from one end to the other, never achieving stasis.
Resnais once described Muriel as “recording the anger of a so-called happy civilization,” and the central dinner scene may be the most pertinent in this regard. Roland amuses the other characters by describing a tall, modern house (seen throughout the film and pictured at the top of this review) built on a subsiding cliff. Despite extensive planning for the house itself, “it’s new, it’s empty, and we wait for it to collapse,” he grins. A metaphor for these characters, postwar(s) French society in general, or both? Bernard certainly seems to think the latter, at least; he randomly films places and events on his 8mm camera in an effort to indict French society for its crimes. “I don’t want to be a filmmaker,” he says, “I’m gathering proofs, that’s all.” But in one crucial moment, he panics when his tape recorder plays his audio instead of records it, revealing his own past and disintegrating his moral authority.
The climax provokes a moment of truth for nearly all the major characters, shattering their illusions and forcing them to confront the present realities many of them have so studiously avoided; by the same token, Cayrol and Resnais’ brilliant formal structure ensures that the film’s style preserves the audience in a state of perceptual limbo so that the solidification of the narrative proves equally provocative for them. It’s a beautiful construction, as contemporary and incisive in its gaze as Resnais’ previous features were memorializing and poetic.
Muriel, ou the Time of Return (aka “The Time of the Return”)
By Christopher Long
Featured on dvdbeaver.com
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963). These are the first three feature films directed by Alain Resnais, and I cannot think of another director whose first three features rival them in quality. Granted, Resnais had already put in more than a decade as a short film maker (mostly documentaries) so he was hardly a novice when Hiroshima, Mon Amour took the film world by storm, but his accomplishment is still stunning.
While Muriel is hardly an obscure film, it is easily the least well-known of the three, but it’s hard to imagine why aside from the most obvious explanation: it hasn’t been as widely distributed either on film or, until now, on DVD. Muriel actually has two titles, the other being The Time of Return – multiple “returns” comprise the narrative’s main body. Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérée), now in his mid-twenties, has just returned from a two year tour of duty in Algeria. Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien), a dignified silver-haired gentleman, has also returned both from a lengthy stay in Algeria (or so he claims) and also into the life of his former love Hélène (Delphine Seyrig, who also starred for Resnais in Marienbad), who is also Bernard’s step-mother. Hélène, for her part, returns incessantly to her imagined idyllic past, an obsession signified in part by her vocation as an antique furniture dealer.
Guy Maddin is today’s king of cinematic meditations on memory, but Resnais was the memory-master of the 60’s. Hélène has a bad memory (which probably explains why she views the past so romantically) and envies those with good memories. Little does she know that her step-son is cursed by his eidetic recall of the most traumatic event of his life. While serving in Algeria, Bernard witnessed the interrogation, torture and murder of Muriel whose precise identity we are never told; in fact, we never even see her. Muriel is never far from Bernard’s mind; he even tells Hélène he is engaged to a woman named Muriel. Some of Bernard’s Algerian comrades, especially the vaguely menacing Robert (Philippe Laudenbach), want Bernard to drop the Muriel matter completely but he is both unable and unwilling to comply. Her memory, or at least his memory of her, must be preserved, and Bernard engages in just every form of recording you can think of: journal entries, a tape recorder and even a small portable film camera. The implication is that physical recording devices function as the best antidote to the unreliability of human memory.
Unlike in his previous two films, Resnais does not jump around in time, though he certainly skips a few beats. Each sequence is situated in a short period of time (a single day, for example) but the narrative dances back and forth among multiple story-lines involving each of the protagonists. Each character has his or her own life both in relation to and apart from the other characters: Bernard has his tortured memories; Alphonse has his own past to escape; Hélène has not only her aloof step-son and fickle lover to deal with but also the mounting gambling debts that threaten her struggling business.
Environment receives as much attention as character, a quality attributable both to Resnais and screenwriter Jean Cayrol who also wrote the catalogue-style narration for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955). The film opens with a rapid-fire montage of Hélène’s household belongings; similar montages focus on building exteriors, street signs, and consumer goods in storefronts.
Muriel is a portrait of trauma as moving as any since, well, Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Lonelyache exudes from every frame of the film, in each precise gesture, each exacting detail. The film is so densely packed with that even after four viewings I feel like I have barely scratched its surface. In fact, I find it more difficult to write about than even Marienbad.
As Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, Jean-Luc Godard is more properly considered a Swiss filmmaker which leaves the titles of “Greatest Living French filmmaker” up for grabs, and no more obvious candidate to fill the post than Alain Resnais. Muriel is one of his greatest achievements. Personally, I think it’s an even better film than Hiroshima, Mon Amour but that’s splitting hairs.
MURIEL (Muriel, ou le Temps d’un Retour)
By Dennis Schwartz
Featured on Ozus’ World Movie Reviews
Published: May 31, 2004
Grade: A
“An innovative, original film that is always fascinating and challenging.”
An intricate film that probably needs more than one viewing to decifer all its mysteries, that is if they can be resolved. This is French New Wave director Alain Resnais’ third film after Hiroshima Mon Amor and Last Year At Marienbad, and is one of his wittiest. Its theme follows in Resnais’ long-standing preoccupation with the vagaries of memory. Muriel is set in Boulogne, ironically a city largely lost under post-war urban developments. The haunting drama was shown at the Venice Film Festival in August of 1963, where Delphine Seyrig was named Best Actress.
Seyrig is a fortyish widow dealing antique furniture from her apartment, who invites an old flame she hasn’t seen since the Algerian war to visit her and her troubled eccentric filmmaker stepson (Thierre), whom she shares an apartment with in Boulogne (a city in the provinces). The stepson is a recent veteran of the Algerian war who can’t escape the memory of a young girl named Muriel he tortured and killed during the war, as he watches grainy 8mm film clips of newsreels which remind him of the Arab girl. The fiftysomething lover Jean-Pierre Kerien, who is also a veteran of the war, arrives with his mistress, the 20-year-old Nita Klein, whom he passes off as his niece. Why he comes for this reunion and why he brings his mistress remains a mystery. We know that Seyrig tries to rekindle her ordinary life by renewing memories of her first love, but finds that it’s to someone who has turned out to be an aging Romeo with white hair–not exactly how she remembered him.
It’s a subtle, spellbinding mosaic of images testifying and destroying the past in a heart-wrenching manner. Seyrig and Thierre fail to realize that things change, that memory is altered with time and new realities. If her precious love is now viewed as disappointing and removed from actuality, the stepson’s reality can only be reinforced by a haunting film he must see becauses he’s overcome and tortured with guilt.
Resnais’ use of bleached colors and his subtle filmmaking style of introducing mood changes is enhanced by the penetrating jump cuts of cinematographer Sacha Vierny, as Resnais makes this intellectual film a playful tease on one’s sensibilities and dream-like reality. In one surrealistic scene, Seyrig’s present lover Roland de Smoke (Claude Sainval) arrives in the evening at Seyrig’s house to escort her to the casino, but Kerien later infers that Seyrig left the house alone to meet Roland at the casino. Resnais teases us with his confounding use of montage, that brilliantly plays into his aim to keep us off guard as to what’s real or fiction.
Alain Resnais’ puzzling thematic psychological drama focuses on the effects of war on the lives of the three emotionally scarred survivors, and points out how obsessed they are with the past and how deep the past wounds still cut into them so that the present can’t be fully enjoyed. Muriel is an innovative, original film that is always fascinating and challenging.
- Return to the Muriel film info page.