Alain Resnais's Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour (1963)

On the surface, Muriel – the film which followed two years after L'Année derniére à Marienbad – is far removed from the earlier film with the concreteness of its characters and its linearity. But the central themes of time and memory remain, and the past intrudes on both the concreteness of the characters and the linearity of the film. Also, very little is as fixed as it may initially appear.

There are discrepancies – sometimes due to misremembering, to forgetfulness, to lies, to more bizarre phenomena – between the past and the present: after twenty years, Aphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien) says Hélène (Delphine Seyrig) has changed her hair, for example; and there are discrepancies between the dialogue and what is at the same time seen onscreen: when Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée) is showing his film of Algeria and speaking about Muriel to the horse hirer (Yves Vincent), for example. What we see in the film as a whole is a claustrophobic, unstable world where lies and uncertainties prevail. The many jump-cuts at the beginning set the mood for this uncertainty. People and things can be seen as if through a distorting mirror, such as the comic glasses Bernard wears at the dinner table, or the several incomplete Bernards that his girlfriend Marie-Do (Martine Vatel) – sometimes referred to as 'Muriel' – sees through a kaleidoscope.

The omnipresence of clocks appears to be focused on the present time, although psychologically it is past time which is the main preoccupation: World War II when Alphonse and the teenage Hélène were lovers, the Algerian war when Bernard and Robert (Philippe Laudenbach) took part in the torture and killing of a young Algerian woman whose name may have been Muriel.

Between the end of World War II and the present Alphonse has invented a false past for himself as a bar owner in Algeria, and although he has in fact never been there he persists in the lie, even at first refusing to take off his coat in Hélène's flat because he claims to be used to strong heat. But then he seems to be made up of lies, and for instance the 'niece' he has brought to Boulonge-sur-mer with him, Françoise (Nita Klein), is in reality his (much younger) lover.

In Boulogne, where an estimaated 85 per cent of the town was destroyed in the war, the past dwells side by side with the present: old buildings with new, and also the rubble of war, but still there's a precariousness, such as the new building Roland de Smoke (Claude Sainval) speaks of which falls from the cliff in turn to become rubble. Hélène's flat is unstable in a different way in that the objects are constantly changing: selling antiques from her own living accommodation, the past in a number of different periods is every-present to her and Bernard. And this physical instability is in tune with the psychological instability of the characters: it is particularly Bernard, Hélène and Alphonse who are haunted by the ghosts of the past.

And Alphonse is also haunted by the present in the form of his brother-in-law Ernest (Jean Champion), who's come to expose his lies and deceit to those assembled in Hélène's flat, as well as ensure Alphonse's return to Paris, to his wife Simone (Francoise Bertin). But this is not to be.

A major film of Alain Resnais's, a major film tout court.