Last Year at Marienbad [1961] [Alain Resnais]

When I started this blog I promised myself that I’d try and avoid the obvious trappings of film criticism; clichéd phrases, OTT statements, hyperbole and the like. And then Last Year at Marienbad came along. A film so unique, so audaciously dynamic in its style and structure it’s almost impossible not to descend into a mad frenzy of hyperbole when describing it.

An unnamed man approaches an unnamed woman and illustrates in great detail an encounter that apparently took place the previous year at a similar chateau in Marienbad, an encounter the woman fails to recall. The distorted manner in which this simple story is told, in narration, the repeated poetic ramblings of the man as he pleads and persuades the woman into acceptance, and on-screen, with the transfixing subjective imagery and lack of cohesion and linearity from one scene to the next, give Marienbad an ineffable feeling that only cinema’s most enigmatic and entrancing films can impart.

The exquisitely dressed people all seem to merge into one, a single distant cipher as lost in the maze of fine architecture and halls as we are. They are like phantoms, adding nothing but coldness and an unwelcoming gaze. There’s a haunting sense of inexorable repetition, these people will forever dance and play the same table games and watch the same play over and over again (a feeling heightened by the repetition of some scenes and lines, slightly reworded or shot differently) much like the attendees at the ball in The Shining.

The female character, referred to in the screenplay as A, seems to be at the edge of this struggle. She’s halfway from becoming another faceless shadow, or tearing away from the monotony with the male character, known as X. X is distinctly separate from the others, just as dryly conceived, but possessing an individuality and purpose the others lack. His emotion is unspoken but unflinchingly imposed through his incessant near begging with A to remember their previous love. It’s as if he is trying to pull her into consciousness, take her off the auto-pilot that all the other directionless people are doomed to be stuck on. Everything in the film is intentionally ambiguous, Delphine Seyrig’s reserved performance doesn’t overdramatize the psychological struggle that I personally see as taking place – In one scene X describes a remark she made to him on the balcony – The sound and image don’t correlate, we see A walking in the grounds as the wind blows her dress all around her, it appears that she’s looking for something – It’s as if she is searching for his memory, dipping into X’s mind and sharing his dreamscape but becoming utterly lost and helpless.

Occasionally X seems to take control of what we’re seeing (leading some to believe that he is representative of a director conjuring up things as they go along), reworking what we see into a scene of his pleasing, whether the scene actually took place is irrelevant – There’s no provable truth to anything we see in the film. Past, present, future, reality, dream, story, time and space are human-crafted trappings and emotional barriers, and thus, displaced – Instead a single moment of pure, continual desire is communicated. The matter-of-fact way the lack of structural conformity is shown makes it so effective – In an early scene A looks around the bar, turns, and is in a different room. The casualness of such a moment (of which there are many, such as the famous selective-shadow shot), loaded with philosophy yet so unpretentious, makes it so beautiful.

Before we even meet any characters or see any people whatsoever, Marienbad has already stood out from the rest and presented its uniqueness in its cinematography. The camera glides over the decor, the elaborate interior architecture creating a labyrinthine effect, long tracking shots moving forward through the corridors but never reaching anything. The lifeless people are as ornaments – fashioned in sumptuous compositions and wide shots of the party, still as statues and just as engrained and forgotten. X and A together have a different kind of imagery, a greater level of perception inherent – mirrors reflect them closer to each other, the geometric gardens serve as frames, the stillness and contrasting moods conveyed beautifully through the assortment of angles, compositions and lengthy shots, giving the film the visual grammar of a dream. Often they will wander up to each other, the soft black and white giving them a kind of ethereal quality, their emotions seem to emanate off of them rather than be spoken out bluntly.

Upon release the films intellectual merits were constantly debated – It was a fashionable picture, something you just had to have an opinion on. Nowadays the film remains as inconclusive in its underlying meaning as ever. I typically would’ve also strived to find meaning in this film, but Last Year at Marienbad is different. More so than any other film I’ve seen its substance is rigidly connected to its style, to the point where they are nearly one and the same. Perhaps most of all the film should simply be allowed to wash over the viewer, free from assigned meanings and an urgency to interpret it. Last Year at Marienbad is one of the screens most unique experiences, and a film I would gladly get lost in time and time again.