LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD Review d: Alain Resnais

L'ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD / LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961)

Direction: Alain Resnais

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Oscar Movies

Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:

Forget all prior claims you've read about Alain Resnais," 90-minute, black-and-white effort L'année dernière à Marienbad / Last Year at Marienbad (1961) — from the bad to the good, from publicity nonsense which declaims the three main characters are named after letters (they are actually unnamed), and watch it raw, for only then you'll realize why greatness is its own company.

That's because the differences are minimal between the great Last Year at Marienbad, a work of art considered a cinematic high point, and Herk Harvey's 1962 B-horror film Carnival of Souls. Their similarities, on the other hand, are considerable, even though I doubt that Harvey had even seen Last Year at Marienbad while making his only feature. I say this because Last Year at Marienbad is one of those works of art that the moment it is experienced the viewer connects with it as something they feel has always been. It is like that tune you hear that becomes a Top 40 hit, and you swear you've known it for years.

Therefore, the fact that Last Year at Marienbad has been dubbed one of the most influential films of all time should not come as a surprise. Perhaps only Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Orson Welles," Citizen Kane, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night can claim to have been more influential. Yet, Last Year at Marienbad is less "influential" than it is a touchstone — a film that, before any other, reached a source common to the human experience.

In addition to Carnival of Souls, a number of other productions were profoundly influenced by — or rather, dipped their toes in the same waters as — Last Year at Marienbad. Those range from George Lucas," THX-1138 to Kubrick's aforementioned 2001 and The Shining; from Ingmar Bergman's The Silence to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

Even the brilliant 1967 British television series The Prisoner and the low-budget 1990s Canadian sci-fi feature Cube seem to have been influenced by Last Year at Marienbad in its M. C. Escherian manifolds. This is further proof that quality transcends ephemeral labeling.

Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad screenplay follows the workings of a symphony, with ideas and dialogue repeated in varying patterns and degrees — softly, loudly, enigmatically, and obviously — from the actual words and intonations of speech to the way shadows play along walls and the repeated game of cards or sticks. The one who wins is a nameless, swarthy Mediterranean type (Sacha Pitoëff), who seems to be the lover or husband of the female lead, an equally unnamed, beautiful brunette (Delphine Seyrig).

The man (Giorgio Albertazzi) who loses at the game seems to narrate a portion of the film: "I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century; this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors; silent deserted corridors." This narration echoes numerous tracking shots of the hotel's corridors, and would be quoted in shots in The Silence and The Shining, as well as the latter-day Russian Ark.

As Last Year at Marienbad progresses, the man who lost the game seems intent on conquering the woman. He approaches her at a gathering, claiming they had been lovers the previous year at the Czechoslovakian town of Marienbad. The woman denies it, then seems to recall their relationship, only to deny it again. Thus begins the process of seduction and rejection.

Through several turns at this dance, the questioning grows more intense, and so does a series of brilliant flashbacks — or dreams. What makes them brilliant is that they are momentarily flashed, making the viewer experience the woman's near-recollection. Or is it not recollection, but wish fulfillment, in wanting to believe this delusional stranger?

The man claims she said she would leave her husband and run off with him. Cue the entrance of the first man, the one who always won at his game. Is this the woman's husband? The game continues.

Then, some elements seem to repeat and time distinctions blur as if the viewer and the characters are caught in some sort of Möbius strip. Another layer of the chronological conundrum comes not only from the temporal warp, but from the fact that the film's costuming and mannerisms, as well as a few other hints, seem to place Last Year at Marienbad in the late 1920s or early 1930s — not in the early 1960s.

Finally, all of these visual and narrative repetitions lead to a scene where the woman is set to meet the first man, who does not show up, and then runs off with the second man. We do not know if this is happening in the present, in the past (where she supposedly might later change her mind and set forth the film's "current" events), or in the mind or minds of one or more of the three main characters.