After a half-century of auteur filmmaking, Alain Resnais figures among the most influential of Nouvelle Vague directors. At just shy of age eighty-five, he remains fixed in the amber of the early four-year trilogy of first and second features Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. His 1963 film, Muriel, or The Time of Return/Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, to be shown six times over a week at the Museum of Modern Art, joins its triptych mates as assessments of implacable time, not in passing but in entrapping individuals in the present moment, and of memory, disjointed, unreliable and partly or wholly created within the mind.

These three, and others in the canon, are often cited as cinematic manifestations of countryman Marcel Proust’s literary vision. However, whereas that pajama’d novelist in a cork-lined room had physical stimuli -- taste, say, or a particular odor -- as the triggers for a revisit to an actual past, the director assembles brief or prolonged non-chronological images with no ready causal relationship.

The screen result of these abrupt shifts -- three dozen and more in Muriel’s first minutes, merely expository that Hélène Aughain (Delphine Seyrig) lives with film aspirant stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée) in the flat from which she sells antique furniture -- and of overlapping dialogue onto a sequence from which the speakers are absent, is to create an image mosaic on the basis of which, as in thought-memory, the viewer must create sequential wholeness.

As in Marienbad, where two people may or may not have had an affaire “last year at Frederiksbad, or perhaps at Marienbad,” one must judge the accuracy of statements, must sort and weigh the different versions of different characters’ remembrances. Against the solidness of a couple repeated ugly bord de mer apartment blocks in Boulogne-sur-Mer, mysterious arguably meaningless secondary figures mingle: Bernard’s semi-sweetheart Marie-Do (Martine Vatel), who may, or may not, be going abroad for three years; a shack-dwelling mussel-gatherer (Jean Dasté) returned from Australia and seeking a stud for his nanny goats; an elegantly dressed tailor Antoine (Gaston Joly) and a casino employee (Jean-Jacques Lagarde); a stableman (Julien Verdier) and his white horse that Bernard rides for some reason along the sea cliffs; pomaded Robert (Philippe Laudenbach), perhaps now an OAS terrorist and formerly Bernard’s comrade-in-arms in Algeria and in the implied torture-death there of a certain Muriel, herself only somewhat explained an hour into the movie and perhaps “alive” as “another” of the same name.

There are others, implying more than they can mean, such as Ernest (Jean Champion), a sinister phone voice that maybe loved Hélène and maybe knows about dastardly deeds during Vichy but who in the flesh is a disappointing brother-in-law come to drag errant Alphonse Noyard (Jean-Pierre Kérien) back to wife Simone (Françoise Bertin), who is possibly the woman in final tracking shots of the deserted Aughain apartment.

Accompanied by much younger “niece”-mistress Françoise (Nita Klein), lying roué Alphonse trains in from Paris at the written request of wartime lover Hélène. This distinguished-looking visitor strings his current woman along while attempting to ignite the older ex’s banked passion and tossing off insinuations about café success in Algiers. For her part, the compulsive gambler, money borrower, Galois smoker, pill popper, inferred ex-addict hostess eludes his grasp, sashays about with accepting real estate developer Roland de Smoke (Claude Sainval), and bugs her deceased husband’s son Bernard, an alternately boorish and suspicious Tony Perkins type.

In a theoretical film studio above a stable, Marie-Do is encouraged to view her asexual beau through a kaleidoscope, a sharper-edged metaphor for the film as a whole. Sometimes superbly, often pedestrianly, this underpinning theory of the subjective sands of reality has been done to death in the plastic arts and literature. But Resnais and Cayrol outfox themselves, for the web of opened, ultimately unfollowed trails -- even the suspicion that Alphonse was involved with the Algerian woman’s fate -- leads, not to the coherence of art, but to mere mirrors within mirrors. The director’s admirers swear by him, his detractors remain amused or confused, which goes to show that reality is, indeed, subjective, erratically interrupted in this film by keening sounds that could conceivably be the Muses bewailing their fate. 

(Released by Koch Lorber Films; not rated by MPAA.)