hiroshima mon amour (d. resnais, w. duras) & nuit et brouillard (d. resnais, w. cayrol)

There is a lot said and written and thought about this movie and if I’m honest I don’t feel as though I have much to add. I recognise its venerated status in the cannon but a few days after watching it it has merged in my mind into a single shot of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada talking endlessly as they mosey through the Hiroshima night. It felt in many ways akin to another film that I struggle with, which is Linklater’s Before Sunrise (whilst recognising the influence is of course the other way round). Some films tiptoe the line between pretension and art and some films run the risk of falling into the abyss. Whilst the split Cortazarian narrative is a neat device, with Elle reliving her past in Nevers as she embraces the post-atomic, post-war era, it neither felt as mind-bending as anything Resnais achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, nor as challenging as Nuit et Broiullard, his devastating Holocaust short which was shown before HMA. The use of politics as a semiotic tool is fraught with danger and Resnais’ employment of Hiroshima, the city and the event, feels problematic. Would a filmmaker today get away with a mawkish love story between a Westerner and a Syrian set in Aleppo? We are nearly into Blier territory, and if anything it is the relative lack of confusion which left me cold in HMA. If the film had pushed its characters closer to the abyss, or maintained the cinematic language it adopts in the opening fifteen minutes, perhaps the semiotics of Hiroshima would not seem so ponderous, but it doesn’t and in the end it just feels immeasurably French. 

muriel (d alain resnais, w jean cayrol)

Somewhere in my head Muriel had acquired iconic status. I'm not quite sure why. There's a book of Truffaut's reviews I was given at the age of 17 which probably talked about it. (It's boxed up somewhere so I cannot check.) Maybe it's just the simplicity of the title. Maybe it's Resnais himself, the mysterious maestro of detached emotion who ended up being a devotee of Ayckbourn. A grand survivor from the heyday of Nouvelle Vague, still doing his idiosyncratic thing. You wonder if they still talk to one another, the survivors, him and Godard and Varda and a few others. Do they head to Cineworld to check out the latest Soderburgh and then have a few pints afterwards in a quiet bar, where maybe someone half-recognises them and comes over in a drunken haze, mistaking one for Truffaut or the other for Giscard D'Estaing?

I kind of hope so. Maybe, if they do, they spend the odd twenty minutes trying to work out what Muriel is really all about. I've rarely seen a film edited in a more unusual fashion. The first 45 minutes is given over entirely to a slightly stagey evening meeting between four people, including the worldly-wise Helene, played by Delphine Seyrig. Then the movie rattles through a whole dollop of plot with a string of three- second edits, which seemingly move everything forward to a new starting point. Which is the cue for the next wordy scene, before another fast forward. As though Resnais had discovered the art of the music video twenty years earlier, dispensed with the music and slotted these sequences into what at times does indeed feel like an Ayckbourn play.

The film's most arresting moment comes when it includes a five minute documentary-style passage, seemingly out of keeping with the remainder of its aesthetic, about the Algerian war. In fact this war haunts the film, with one character still affected by the abuses he witnessed there, and another falsely claiming to have served there. These strong, political themes are mixed with dry humour and melodrama. The whole concoction makes for a film which is frequently baffling and constantly wrong-foots the viewer. We never quite know what type of movie we're watching. It challenges our patience; which is not such a bad thing, but in a somewhat peculiar twist it does so through it's banality. Perhaps in the end it's what you would get if you were to blend Sartre's seaside tale, Nausea, with a dash of Ayckbourn and a soupcon of Battle of Algiers. One awaits the remake.