Muriel is the most difficult, by far, of Resnais' three feature films, but it is clearly drawn from the same repertoire of themes as the first two. (p. 23)

The reason Muriel is difficult is because it attempts to do both what Hiroshima and what Marienbad did. It attempts to deal with substantive issues—war guilt over Algeria, the OAS, the racism of the colons—even as Hiroshima dealt with the bomb, pacifism, and collaboration. But it also, like burden of this double intention—to be both concrete and abstract—doubles the technical virtuosity and complexity of the film….

Unlike Hiroshima Mon Amour and L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, Muriel directly suggests an elaborate plot and complex interrelationships. [Resnais] gives us a chain of short scenes, horizontal in emotional tone, which focus on selected undramatic moments in the four main characters…. Muriel, like L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, should not puzzle, because there is nothing "behind" the lean, staccato statements that one sees. They can't be deciphered, because they don't say more than they say. (p. 24)

[Although] the story is not difficult to follow, Resnais' techniques for telling it deliberately estrange the viewer from the story. Most conspicuous of these techniques is his elliptical, off-center conception of a scene…. In Resnais' films, all speech, including dialogue, tends to become narration—to hover over the visible action, rather than to issue directly from it. (pp. 24-5)

When Resnais cuts abruptly, he pulls the viewer away from the story. His cutting acts as a brake on the narrative, a form of aesthetic undertow, a sort of filmic alienation effect.

Resnais' use of speech has a similar "alienating" effect on the viewer's feelings. Because his main characters have something not only benumbed but positively hopeless about them, their words are never emotionally moving…. [The] firm prosiness of the dialogue in Muriel is not intended to mean anything different from the awful poetizing of the earlier two long films. Resnais proposes the same subject in all his films. All his films are about the inexpressible. (The main topics which are inexpressible are two: guilt and erotic longing). And the twin notion to inexpressibility is banality. In high art, banality is the modesty of the inexpressible (p. 25)

Resnais' techniques, despite the visual brilliance of his films, seem to me more literary than cinematic….

Most literary of all is Resnais' love of formalism. Formalism itself is not literary. But to appropriate a complex and specific narrative in order deliberately to obscure it—to write an abstract text on top of it, as it were—is a very literary procedure…. Muriel is designed so that, at any given moment of it, it's not about anything at all. At any given moment it is a formal composition; and it is to this end that individual scenes are shaped so obliquely, the time sequence scrambled, and dialogue kept to a minimum of informativeness. (pp. 25-6)

The typical formula of the new formalists of the novel and film is a mixture of coldness and pathos: coldness enclosing and subduing an immense pathos. Resnais' great discovery is the application of this formula to "documentary" material, to true events locked in the historical past. Here—in Resnais' short films, particularly Guernica, Van Gogh, and, above all, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)—the formula works brilliantly, educating and liberating the viewer's feelings…. The triumph of Nuit et Brouillard is its absolute control, its supreme refinement in dealing with a subject that incarnates the purest, most agonizing pathos. For the danger of such a subject is that it can numb, instead of stir, our feelings. Resnais has overcome this danger by adopting a distance from his subject which is not sentimental, and which yet does not cheat the horror of its horrifyingness. Nuit et Brouillard is overwhelming in its directness, yet full of tact about the unimaginable.

But in Resnais' three feature films, the same strategy is not nearly so apt or satisfying. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, and Muriel the lucid and brilliantly compassionate documentarist has been superseded by the aesthete, the formalist. Noble sentiments—like guilt for the bomb (in Hiroshima Mon Amour) and for the French atrocities in Algeria (Muriel)—become the subject for aesthetic demonstration. Nostalgia itself becomes an object for nostalgia, the memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of feeling. The method is to enclose a strong emotion—say, as in L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, the pathos of erotic frustration and longing—in a visual setting which has the character of an abstraction—say, that of a huge chateau peopled with haute couture mannequins. The aim of this formalism is to break up content, to question content. The questionable reality of the past is the subject of all Resnais' films. More exactly, for Resnais, the past is that reality which is both unassimilable and dubious. The new formalism of the French novels and films is thus a dedicated agnosticism about reality itself.

In the pursuit of these themes, Muriel is the most intelligent, the most original, and the most beautiful of Resnais' three feature films. But—fundamentally out of sympathy as I am with the formalist aesthetic that informs so many French novels and films today—I must admit to not really caring for Muriel. I admire the film, but I don't love it…. Muriel is somehow depressing, weighty. It's an extremely intelligent film, and an exciting one visually; but these virtues do not work together. There is much less in Muriel of that preciousness, that studied air, that damned artiness that nearly ruins what's good in Hiroshima Mon Amour and L'Année Dernière à Marienbad. But the film still lacks an essential ingredient of greatness in the cinema. (pp. 26-7)

A beautiful film, though, Muriel certainly is. First, in its visual composition. This is a strong point in all Resnais' films, but here he surpasses himself. (p. 27)