Despite feeling pigeonholed as “la divine” in the films she made throughout the sixties, a characterization that originated with Last Year at Marienbad, her second collaboration with Alain Resnais immediately saw her bucking that archetype. Instead of a glamorous mystery woman, Seyrig plays Hélène, an antique-shop owner who is twenty-to-thirty years older than Seyrig was at the time. Like Marienbad, Muriel plays like an abstract assembly of narrative shards, an atmospheric chamber piece that chronicles the return of a repressed past—the characters’ experiences of World War II and the Algerian War. As Hélène, Seyrig is Muriel’s anchoring force, a stubbornly optimistic widow who cuts through the film’s doom and gloom, simultaneously lending it an additional layer of eeriness (courtesy of Seyrig’s stellar smile) and grounding it with a sense of hope, however misguided. For her performance, Seyrig won the Best Actress prize at the 1963 Venice Film Festival, proving that her post-Marienbad rise to fame was no fluke; she was not just a pretty face, but a consummate performer with shapeshifting abilities.