Alain Resnais’s “Muriel, or the Time of Return” has languished beneath the radar of most film lovers, even those who came of age with the Nouvelle Vague. Arriving on the heels of Mr. Resnais’s two international sensations, “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad,” his third feature film tested the patience of those who had perhaps too enthusiastically accepted the portentous incantations of the former and the silky inscrutability of the latter. Bored with metaphysics, they missed the unsparing humanism of his masterpiece. Even its admirers, during the film’s brief New York run in the fall of 1963, stigmatized it as obscure and, worse, as a movie that had to be seen twice to be appreciated. That issue, at least, is mooted by Koch Lorber’s DVD release. “Muriel” is an indispensable film. You can now watch it as often as you like.

A reputation for difficulty is almost impossible to undo. The sad reality is that as people get older they are less, rather than more, likely to tackle works of art shrouded in warning labels. The Joyce industry succeeded only in stamping an entertainingly complex writer as radioactive. By any standard, however, “Muriel” has gotten a bad rap. Though it rewards intimacy, it does not require the exegesis it seems effortlessly to generate. A degree in Bergson is unnecessary; a relationship with the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet is entirely optional. “Muriel” is an expression of painstaking realism, configured with wit and in the generic trappings of a thriller. As Truffaut observed, a more helpful grounding is a familiarity with Hitchcock.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Hélène (Delphine Seyrig), a prematurely gray widow on the verge of middle age, lives with her stepson, Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée), a traumatized veteran of the war in Algeria, in the coastal city of Boulogne-sur-mer, which is rebuilding itself from the rubble of World War II. Barely eking out a living by selling antiques from her apartment (Bernard complains, “You never know which period you’ll wake up to in this flat”), Hélène borrows money and compulsively gambles it away. Bernard, haunted by his role in torturing to death an Algerian prisoner named Muriel, pretends that he is dating a girl of that name while hoarding evidence — on film, tape, and in journals — of his war crime, which he blames in part on another soldier.

Hélène’s life is also shadowed by war, particularly the older man who saved and abandoned her 20 years ago, her first lover, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kerien), whom she impulsively invites to visit. He arrives with his young mistress, Francoise (Nita Klein), passing her off as his niece. Alphonse is a habitual liar and attempts to leech onto the town and Hélène’s affections while escaping his failed business and marriage. His brother-in-law comes looking for him, ultimately crushing Hélène’s illusions.

Those who can’t tolerate “Muriel” argue that the storyline is needlessly racked by its circuitous treatment. In fact, the treatment is everything — and more than four decades later, it remains innovative, persuasive, and illuminating. The script, by the publisher, novelist, and poet Jean Cayrol, leaves nothing unsaid but forces the viewer to participate in its emotional turmoil by eliding everything that isn’t necessary. The integrity and falsity of relationships and the way the trappings of the past stifle the present are magnified by ingenious cutting that, like a musical work, waxes and wanes in tempo.

In the novels of Robbe-Grillet, consciousness is sublimated to objective description, which gave his script for “Last Year at Marienbad” a heartless game-playing beauty. With “Muriel,” Mr. Resnais cunningly used narrative omniscience to expose the interior lives of his characters. The first sequence is startling. A prelude to the main action, it depicts Hélène politely waiting out her last customer so that she can rush to the train station to greet Alphonse. The scene lasts all of 35 seconds, and in the first 24 there are 24 cuts of uneven duration, speeding up with Hélène’s anxiety to be on her way: recurring shots of the customer’s gloved hand holding the door, Hélène’s coat and hat, the kettle, the antiques, Hélène drawing on a cigarette or closing a tape measure. The shots do not reflect the point of view of the characters, but of the director laying out the tableau; yet the tempo and images perfectly convey Hélène’s impatience.

The next 48 minutes are like an adagio movement, detailing the events of that evening, as Hélène brings Alphonse and Francoise home, introduces them to Bernard, and, astonishingly, informs Alphonse that she has a date (like the dope addict she apparently once was, she needs a fix at the casino), as Bernard similarly invites Francoise out for the evening and abandons her to sit by himself in a bar. This section closes as Alphonse, pretending to be asleep in a chair in Hélène’s bedroom, reaches for her hand. The story is conveyed with a boding suspense: Alphonse and Francoise arrive with the slick artificiality of honeymoon killers (nervously cold, he is never seen without an overcoat or scarf), and Bernard’s weirdness leaves gaping mouths whenever he speaks.

The next morning is announced with a shot of Bernard on a horse, riding on the coast like Lancelot in search of a Muriel he can save, only to be greeted by an old man who asks if Bernard can procure for him a mate for his goat. The subsequent sequence is an allegretto tour de force of comings and goings, elliptical dialogue, missed cues, failed connections, new characters, vague wanderings, passing sex, quotidian actions and musings, and the unspecified passing of time. Hélène’s lover, a developer named Roland de Smoke (Claude Sainval), tries to comfort her, who is tortured by misgivings about Alphonse: “Love affairs are like dinners,” he says, “Some guests behave, others don’t.”

The remarkable denouement includes, among other incidents, a lunch at which Alphonse is exposed, the rendition of an old music hall song counterpoised with shots of the soulless new buildings in Boulogne, a rash murder, an explosion, and Hélène’s self-exile from her home. In the end, she makes a half-hearted attempt to follow Alphonse, who — like the ghost of shame and misery — sneaks off on a bus bound for Brussels, while his wife arrives at the abandoned apartment and walks through the rooms, now as empty as the streets in the closing sequence of Antonioni’s “L’eclisse,” released the year before.

The stylistic exuberance, amplified by Sacha Vierny’s color cinematography and Hans-Werner Henze’s ominous musical incursions, would mean little if the characters did not resonate so vividly. “Muriel” belongs to the genre of films and novels that sets out to map the way we live, and its concern for lives caught between an insufficiently explored past and uncertain future remains compelling. The specific situations entailing colonial wars, the lure of anaesthetizing habits, and the shoals of a constantly deconstructing present are as timely as New York in 2007. “Muriel” is a marvel of unblinking compassion, detailing lives we cannot fail to understand better than we might like.

The same cannot be said of Mr. Robbe-Grillet’s “La Belle Captive” (also from Koch Lorber), but if your idea of a good time is to watch the drop-dead gorgeous Gabrielle Lazure writhing naked or in a white diaphanous gown, than your idea comports with mine and you may get a kick out of this 1983 Eurotrash vampire spy movie. With music by Schubert, Ellington, and an accordionist, and metallic colors by the photographer Henri Alekan, “La Belle” shows that the novelist knows how to make a film, and may even encourage curiosity about his other films, which never have had much of a reception here despite his literary celebrity in the 1960s.

The substance, however, is an old routine: the nightmare that never ends. The borrowings range from Kafka and Arthur Schnitzler (“Traumnovelle,” the source for “Eyes Wide Shut”) to Fritz Lang’s “Woman in the Window,” Boris Karloff in “The Devil Commands,” “A Clockwork Orange,” Maria Bava’s “Lisa and the Devil,” and who knows how many other cultural leavings. On the other hand, the others don’t have Ms. Lazure, whose sensuousness makes Mr. Robbe-Grillet’s indulgences worth indulging.

Mr. Giddins’s most recent book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.