A recurring editing motif grows through Alain Resnais’ Muriel, or the Time of Return, a kind of pre-split screen simultaneity: we catch glimpses, sometimes for only a shot, sometimes across several, of what other people are doing while we are watching the central story of the film. The first instance of this to my knowledge is of Hélène (Delphine Seyrig) going to meet Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien) at the train station, but finding that the train arrived early. Hélène questions the stationmaster but eventually Resnais cuts away from the scene to a man who we eventually find out is Alphonse (but who is anonymous at the time) with his “niece” Françoise (Nita Klein) at a nearby café, but the dialog held between Hélène and the stationmaster continues to play over the first moments of this scene in the café. This is only the beginning of a pattern Resnais and his editors (Claudine Merlin, Kenout Peltier, and Eric Pluet) will continue throughout the film, cross-cutting between a central dramatic scene and lesser but synchronic moments in the same town of Boulogne. Eventually this pattern peaks around the middle of the film, in the Muriel’s two-part structural centerpiece. The first section is a heavy, almost frantic montage which captures not just all the above mentioned main characters (including Hélène’s step-son Bernard, played by Jean-Baptise Thiérrée) but a wide range of other people, activities, locations, and live still-lifes around town. The main characters are almost never together in this sequence, although once or twice they notice one another, have a brief chat, or are at least noticed by Sacha Vierny’s camera (the camera sees Bernard ride by on his motorbike and pans to see Alphonse enter a building on the same street, both characters unaware of each other). Their presences are given equal if not lesser weight to other scenes, lives, and details around the town and generally inconsequential to the drama of the story. The second part of this centerpiece follows this montage, which cuts to documentary footage of French soldiers in Algiers—presumably shot by Bernard who recently returned from his service and now is using his camera to “gather evidence”—with Bernard’s voice-over recounting with a disturbing combination of specific detail and horrible ellipsis the torturing of a girl named Muriel by him and his fellow troops. What are we to make of this editing technique, as well as its montage collision with Bernard’s haunting, central recollection?

This synchronicity suggests a few things within the fiction: one, that a world of people, lives, places, and events exist outside the story of Muriel but within its diegesis (the story world); two, it opens up the possibility that the drama that the story is following is not only not the only one in the world, but perhaps the wrong one, or one missing other parts, sides, and facets; and finally, while this synchronicity seems to call into being or reveal new things inside the film and around its story and its characters, it also greatly delineates separation in the very act of generously expanding the breadth of the film world. This latter aspect is perhaps the most important, as a guiding thematic to Jean Cayrol’s script for Muriel is how each main character exists in their own sense of time. The strongest characters in this sense are Hélène, Bernard, and the town of Boulogne. Hélène pointedly sells and lives among antiques, passionately holds onto her the memories of her pre-war relationship with Alphonse, and says repeatedly that she cannot find her keys and that she remembers nothing of a certain face—in other words, she is not living in the present. At the same time, she maintains a gambling habit, which banks on a desire for the future at the same time ignoring the reality of the present. Bernard lives in the present but sees mostly vestiges of his time in Algeria, emblematized by his experience with Muriel, who he mysteriously tells his step-mother is his fiancé. His desire to photograph “evidence” and his combative looks and responses to Alphonse’ comments about the older man’s time running a club in Algeria suggest a desire to find in contemporary France traces of what occurred and what he did in the colony. The various obsessions over different pasts in different places unities in the town of Boulogne itself, which was mostly razed during the World War 2 and what was left mostly torn down for development afterwards. The town therefore exists in a precarious and unique temporal position, spatially filled with reminders of World War 2 (street signs, memorials) as well as memories (Alphonse and Hélène share a romantic memory of a trip there) but has been rebuilt into something modern, contemporary, and unrecognizable. This new status is emblematized by a building (shown a number of times in the film) that was carefully constructed but was later realized to have been built on a receding slope of a hill. Newly made, instantly abandoned, the modern building was never inhabited and people are simply waiting for it to collapse into ruins.

What does all this have to do with synchronistic cross-cutting? The editing pattern literally separates each character in both space and time, showing them at roughly similar moments doing completely different things in completely different parts of Boulogne. When the characters are all together—such as in the three major dinner parties—they still clearly exist in different times, each talking around the other and about their own obsessions, and Resnais’ editing gets more skittish and the camera whip-pans a great deal more during these scenes. It is as if, in the rare moment of a shared space, the characters destabilize the communal sense of time, and as a result all lines uttered, movements, exits, entrances, and gestures made appear frantic, unmotivated, and disconnected. Everyone seems in their natural environment when separated and autonomous, and the disconcerting editing Resnais employs when people are together (breaking the 180 degree rule often, eliding time or action for no apparent reason, rapid camera movements and very quick editing within a tiny space) seems more natural, motivated, and structured when everybody is out and about, on their own paths, living in their own sense of time, and absorbed in their on solipsism. This is not a positive existence however; Hélène’s time alone at the casino (and always losing there), Bernard’s ridiculous excursions on horseback to the coast and encounters with a strange, lonely man who needs a male goat to complete his farm, and Alphonse’ sociability that is eventually revealed to be a lonely escape from his real life all may be confidently autonomous, but also profoundly dissatisfied and self-consumed.

One of the most marvelous moments in Muriel—and one of the greatest endings in any film, in my opinion—is the last shot of the film, where an anonymous woman (who is hinted to be the wife of Alphonse, whose marriage was revealed only minutes previous) walks into the open door of Hélène’s apartment and looks around for its inhabitants. Suddenly Vierny’s camera is mobile—the entire film had only used panning motion from a tripod, and this last shot is either on a very limber dolly or more likely one of the most stable handheld camera shots I have seen, and follows the woman around as she moves from room to room, opening doors and peering inside. Because of the previous lack of camera movement this is the first time we have seen the space of Hélène’s apartment formally unified; in the past it had only been fragmented through editing, which played with lights turned off and on, doors open and shut, and epic reverse shots to move around the apartment through fragmentation. All the other characters are out and about, many facing impending crises, and most fleeing from Boulogne and thus concluding the narrative (existence in the town is essentially what creates the story, once the shared space is abandoned everyone again splinters off to their own trajectories). After jumping from strand to strand, Resnais ends the film by following his synchronic editing pattern and looking at this apartment—whole, right there before us—while everyone else is missing from it, doing something else. The unbroken shot is a moment of unified time and space, and it devastatingly occludes every single character from Muriel’s central story. They simply cannot exist in the very same space at the very same time, as this shot illustrates. In a way, this shot mirrors Bernard’s montage of Algeria, another time and space where the characters were absent, yet also a time and space that figures in each and every one of their lives (as does World War 2, but that exists as a memory of an experience, whereas Algeria has something to do with a contemporary absence). Similarly, while the editing of the film often suggested the importance of things away from our characters and our story, to conclude on a shot like this is finally siding with that other world inside the film (one could say it is the world itself), granting a greater importance to an existence outside Muriel’s story and characters. As hectically liberating as the cross-cutting through the film may be—respecting differing activities, differing spaces, differing temporal states all seemingly within the same time and all seeming within the same town of Boulogne—the profound melancholy of the film congeals completely in this final shot. The fact that all these people’s subtly varying obsessions over the time they are living in keep them talking at cross purposes, keep them from understanding one another, keep them from being happy, and keep them from engaging in the world around them is brought to the forefront in their inability to even exist together in the here and now.