Main Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff, Francoise Spira
Release Year: 1961
Country: FR/IT
Run Time: 93 minutes
Plot
A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the movie is a riddle of seduction, a mercurial enigma darting between a present and past which may not even exist, let alone converge. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as an unnamed sophisticate attempting to convince a similarly nameless woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met and were romantically involved a year ago in the same enormous, baroque European hotel. In the end, it hardly matters -- they're not characters so much as pawns anyway. Hypnotically dreamlike, Last Year at Marienbad is a surrealist parody of Hollywood melodrama, a high-fashion romance with a dark, alien underbelly. According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence -- the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
Review
One of the most enigmatic and distinctive movies ever made, this collaboration of director Alain Resnais with leading French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet has confounded and intrigued audiences since it first led the wave of European art movies in the early 1960s. Wandering through and around the story of a mysterious love triangle as it wanders through and around its hotel setting, the film can be interpreted, among other possibilities, as a parody of Hollywood romantic melodramas; as an effort to find a new way to tell a romantic melodrama, free of the clichés imposed by Hollywood; as a mystery, whose answer is finally unresolved and perhaps unresolvable; as, therefore, a Rashomon-like examination of the uncertainty of truth; as a philosophical inquiry into truth, time, memory, and personal identity; as a purely sensual melange of shapes and sounds -- grand architecture, striking compositions, and strange soundtrack elements; as a self-reflexive examination of cinema itself; or as a game, like the logarithm game at the center of the story, played by the filmmakers with the audience. Whatever interpretation(s) one favors, this is, for better or for worse, an unforgettable and unique movie, a high-water mark of postwar European art cinema. ~ Leo Charney, All Movie Guide
This section's tone or style may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.
This uniquely French film is set at an elite social gathering at a château. A man approaches a woman and indicates to her that they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced she is "waiting here" for him. Through deeply psychological symbolism and a clever narrative and provocative language, did they meet or was it a fantasy or is it now fantasy? Was the woman seduced by the man now and in the flashbacks, or is it the viewing audience alone that is slowly seduced through the use of the narrative and imagery?
As the film progresses, the relationship of the characters and the sequence of events are intricately woven together, forcing the viewer to a higher level of sophistication and understanding of the complexities in male and female psyche and sexuality. Conversations and events are repeated several times, but in different places in the château and its grounds. Several sequences involve the men at the château passing the time with various games (such as Nim and target shooting). There are numerous tracking shots of the château 's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
Production and style
The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. The dream-like nature of the film has fascinated and baffled audiences and critics, some hailing it as a masterpiece, others finding it to be incomprehensible. Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the château and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden; although the people cast long dramatic shadows, the trees in the garden do not.
Still from L'année dernière à Marienbad. In this surreal image, the couples cast long shadows but the trees do not.
Marienbad is a town in the Czech Republic (it is not clear whether the film's setting is meant to be Marienbad or somewhere else). Resnais filmed the scenes within several châteaux and their grounds, including the Nymphenburg Palace and Schleissheim Palace in Bavaria. He edited them to produce a disorienting space that does not make geographical sense. Some additional footage was shot at an indoor studio. The woman's wardrobe was designed by Coco Chanel.[2]
Last Year at Marienbad forms a thematic basis for Marienbad My Love, a novel about a cinematographer who commits himself to creating a science-fiction-themed tribute to the film. The book, by Mark Leach, incorporates prose that reflects some of the narration and dialogue of the film.[3] The music video for To the End, a 1994 single by British Rock group Blur, is based on the film.
References
^ According to Thomas Beltzer, in Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation, the film script may have been based in part on The Invention of Morel, a science fiction novel published in 1940 by the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. The Invention of Morel is about a fugitive, hiding out alone on a deserted island who one day awakens to discover that the island is miraculously filled with anachronistically dressed people who, according to the text, “dance, stroll up and down, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad." He later learns that they are creations of an inventor, Morel, whose recording machine captured the exact likenesses of a group of friends, which are "played" over and over again.
L'aventure de Guy (1936) ·Schéma d'une identification (1946) ·Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (1946) ·Visite à Oscar Dominguez (1947) ·Visite à Lucien Coutaud (1947) ·Visite à Hans Hartung (1947) ·Visite à Félix Labisse (1947) ·Visite à César Doméla (1947) ·Van Gogh (1947) ·Portrait d'Henri Goetz (1947) ·Le lait Nestlé (1947) ·L'alcool tue (1947) ·La bague (1947) ·Journée naturelle (1947) ·Van Gogh (1948) ·Malfray (1948) ·Les jardins de Paris (1948) ·Châteaux de France (1948) ·Guernica (1950) ·Gauguin (1950) ·Statues Also Die (1953) ·Night and Fog (1955) ·Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) ·Le mystère de l'atelier quinze (1957) ·Le chant du Styrène (1958)
