Muriel is a bold and beautiful film. Resnais takes a very ordinary incident-a reunion of a provincial woman and her former lover-and out of the trivia of everyday anxieties creates a mosaical masterpiece that probes themes of time, memory and conscience. In Boulogne (a city almost entirely rebuilt since the war), Hélène Aughain (Delphine Seyrig) sells antique furniture from her apartment; overnight, her decor can change from Second Empire to rustic Normandy. What remains constant is the hermetic life of her memories, and those of her stepson Bernard, who spends his days sorting evidence of French atrocities in Algeria collected on his tour of duty. The memory of Muriel, a young girl tortured by his fellow soldiers, is more real to him than day-to-day life now. When Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien), Hélène's old lover, shows up unexpectedly, the past comes full circle, only to prove finally the impossibility of remembering, and of forgetting. Resnais abstracts the drama by presenting it in a chain of short scenes rapidly intercut, horizontally connected in the present-always in the present. The past is emotion, and as Susan Sontag has written, "(Muriel) is Resnais' way of making a realistic story over into an examination of the form of emotion."