"Last Year at Marienbad", in Seattle May 20th

One of the movies which drastically changed cinema. If you are told it is a movie for intellectuals, do not believe it, for it's to your imagination that it is addressing. In Seattle May 20th.

Shot in three Bavarian castles, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais, winner of the 1961 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, the movie is set in an unreal world which is the one of memory, fantasy, phantasm and dreams. Past and present mingle and blur, the real and the uncertain are interweaved and are hard to distinguish. But, according to Alain Resnais, "this movie is not an enigma, each viewer can find his own solution. This solution will always be a good one, but it won’t be the same than his neighbor’s one".

In a luxurious baroque palace, before the eyes of the enigmatic M (Sacha Pitoëff), X, ‘a man with an Italian accent’ (Giorgio Albertazzi) attempts to convince a ‘brunette’ (Delphine Seyrig), that they have already met and have been in love at Marienbad or elsewhere and that they have arranged this meeting in the palace. Around them, the guests (prisoners, ghosts, hypothetical characters?) seem to live in a frozen time.

‘A’ finally relents: "After a last attempt to escape again, she seems to be accepting that she is the one the stranger is waiting for, and she seem to agree about going away with him toward something, some nameless thing, something different: love, poetry, freedom ... or, perhaps, death ... " (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad, Ciné-Roman, 1961).

This story has many access doors. Alain Resnais himself proposed several of them, revealing that he used archetypes which are constitutive of the collective unconscious: "It could be said that it is the pursuit of the Other or Prince Charming coming to the castle in order to wake her "beauty", an envoy of Death picking his victim a year later, or simply a woman who has an affair and hesitates between her husband and her lover.”

Beyond these four inputs, Orpheus, the myth of eternal return or Faust, can also come to mind. This movie is subject to multiple attempts of explanation, for it is asking the viewer's cooperation. One can interpret it by psychoanalysis or psychiatry or appreciate its hypnotic formal beauty. It can be seen as a poem or a science fiction narrative, decrypted as a puzzle or a maze, an introspection or an investigation. It can, too, be understood as a mental manipulation or a drama, a fantasy tale or a search of lost time. 

It is clear in any case that it will fuel your post screening discussions and that you won’t soon forget this eerie and fascinating film.

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