| Errors | Missing | Unverified | Supported |
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In Alain Resnais’ 1963 film Muriel ou le Temps d'un retour (Muriel, or the Time of Return), Simone is a crucial supporting character who serves as the catalyst for the film's climax.
She is the wife of Alphonse, the man who has come to Boulogne-sur-Mer to visit his former lover, Hélène.
Here are the specific details regarding her role and significance:
While Alphonse arrives at Hélène’s apartment claiming to be a successful businessman and traveling with a young woman named Françoise (whom he introduces as his niece), it is eventually revealed that his life is a series of fabrications. Simone is his legal wife whom he has left behind to pursue this nostalgic, failed reunion with Hélène.
Simone does not appear until the final act of the film. She travels to Boulogne-sur-Mer looking for Alphonse. Her arrival functions as a narrative "bomb" that shatters the illusions the characters have built. When she finally enters Hélène’s apartment, she exposes Alphonse’s lies, revealing his financial instability and his habitual tendency to run away from his responsibilities.
True to the film's themes of memory and the "return," Simone represents the "present" and the "mundane reality" that Alphonse is trying to escape. While Hélène and Alphonse are stuck trying to reconstruct a romanticized past from twenty years prior, Simone is the physical embodiment of the life Alphonse actually leads in the present day.
Simone’s arrival coincides with the total disintegration of the household. By the time she enters the apartment looking for her husband, almost everyone has fled:
The film ends with Simone wandering through the empty apartment, calling for Alphonse. This reinforces the film’s theme of "le temps d'un retour" (the time of a return)—showing that when the return finally happens, the people and the past one seeks are no longer there.
Simone is the abandoned wife whose presence forces the truth to the surface. She is the final character to enter the stage, and her search for Alphonse underscores the film’s central tragedy: that characters are constantly searching for people and memories that have already vanished.
The summary completely omits Ernest, the character who actually performs the actions attributed to Simone (exposing lies, demanding return).
The summary fails to clarify that Simone never interacts with Hélène or Alphonse on screen in the apartment; she misses them.
In Muriel or the Time of Return, Simone (played by Françoise Bertin) is Alphonse's wife. She arrives at Hélène's apartment only in the film's final moments, after the other characters (Hélène, Alphonse, Bernard) have fled or scattered. Contrary to the AI summary, she does not expose Alphonse's lies or confront the household; that role is performed earlier by Ernest, Alphonse's brother-in-law. Simone finds the apartment empty and wanders through it, serving as a coda that emphasizes the film's theme of a 'return' to nothingness.