Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.
Historical Background: The French New Wave of the late 1950’s and 1960’s self-consciously invented itself as a challenge to the mainstream conventions of filmmaking. It questioned both the technical habits of the cinematography of the day and the philosophical underpinnings of art itself. It set itself in opposition to the “poetic realism” that dominated French filmmaking in the period immediately following World War II, which the New Wave advocates viewed as a great lie. Art, they argued, can never mirror reality and should not pretend to do so. The artist is inevitably juxtaposed between the reality that he hopes to represent and the audience. Art, according to New Wave philosophers must be its own reality – a separate existence, superimposed on reality (hence “surreal”).
The banner year of 1959 saw the release of the first great films from the New Wave auteurs, including A Bout de Souffle (“Breathless”) and The 400 Blows. The most influential New Wave film after Breathless was probably Alain Resnais’ brilliant film Last Year at Marienbad. It is a film like no other. It won the Golden Lion award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and sometimes finds itself on both top-10 and worst-10 film lists. It is an extraordinarily enigmatic film, without a linear narrative or normal spatial restrictions. The meaning of the film will remain shrouded in mystery as you leave the theater or remove the cassette or disc from your player. Even Resnais claimed that the film had no meaning – though I will try to convince you in this review that he was mistaken!
The “Story”: Let’s start with a brief review of what occurs over the course of this 93 minute film. The film begins with a long series of slow tracking shots along the empty labyrinthian hallways of an opulent Baroque-style French luxury resort hotel. There are ornate carvings, domed ceilings, magnificent cherubs, and gilded mirrors. During this “tour”, a narrator recites poetic observations about the hotel but we soon notice that the narration is doubling back on itself, repeating the same phrases again and again. It is not until perhaps ten minutes of this that we encounter the first human forms, but these people, dressed in formal attire, are mostly motionless, standing or sitting in statuesque manner. We come to a large ballroom where an audience is gathered watching a play – the old play within a film gimmick. The content of the play will prove important as it basically foreshadows what is to come in the main “plot” of the film.
The plot, such as it is, is most remarkable for its elusiveness. It involves three characters listed in the credits simply as A, X, and M. A is an attractive woman (Delphine Seyrig) of about 30-35 years of age, who is accompanied in some sense by M (Sacha Pitoëff), who might be her husband or her lover. He is a gamesman who enjoys the tables in the casino of the hotel. X (Giorgio Albertazzi), who doubles as protagonist and narrator, engages A in conversation throughout most of the film. He claims to have met her previously, at Marienbad (or possibly it was Fredericksburg or Baden-Salsa) a year ago, that they had an affair and nearly ran off together, but that she had pulled back at the last moment and asked him to wait a year for her. She, on the other hand, claims to have no recollection of him or having been involved with him. From time to time in these conversations (if time is even relevant here), lines of dialog or movements begun in one location are completed in a different location and with the characters in different clothing – as if time and space limitations have no meaning here. X describes in vivid detail how their relationship transpired a year ago and we see the events reenacted or enacted – one can’t be sure – except sometimes the images don’t precisely match his description (suggesting the imprecision and subjectivity of memory). For her part, A remembers only a few vague snapshots of events that took place in her room, where she may or may not have been attacked by X, may or may not have made love with him, which may or may not have been consensual, and she may or may not have been later shot by M.
Some of these conversations take place in the hotel’s amazingly geometric garden. It has the appearance of a mathematical maze and is decorated with shrubs cut into the form of pyramids (which do not cast shadows even when the characters do), and magnificent sculptures. One sculpture in particular commands the attention of A and X. It depicts a man and a woman walking together and the man is either cautiously signally the woman to hold up or the woman is alerting the man by pointing to something ahead. Or possibly both or neither. Like the people of the hotel, the couple in the statue are frozen in an eternal relationship to one another. All of this is presented in exquisite black-and-white photography.
Themes: The two main themes, here, in my opinion, are the nature of memory and the nature of art. In a sense, its just one theme, because both memory and art are creatively representational and subjective. For memory, that is the neurophysiological fact of the matter while for art that is the position taken by the New Wave artists. That the film comments on the nature of memory is widely accepted by critics, though it’s a fairly small part of the film's overall thrust. We see depicted the discrepancies between X’s memory and A’s denial of previous encounter. We see occasional discrepancies between X’s narrative of those memories and their depiction. And we see the random access quality of memory whereby some of the remembered events cycle back repeatedly, occur out of sequence, or jump from one locale to another.
With respect to how this film comments on the nature of art, I want to acknowledge as a source an essay by Thomas Beltzer, Asst. Prof. of English at Lane College in Jackson, TN, published on the internet as a review of this film, without which these issues could not have been so evident to me. The script for Last Year at Marienbad was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Although no credit was given, it was based on a novella entitled The Invention of Morel, by the Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares, written in 1940. In Casares’ story, a fugitive named Morel is hiding out on an island and suddenly finds the island populated by people dressed in out-of-date costumes “who dance, stroll up and down, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad.” Morel, it seems, has invented a device somewhat like the holo-deck of the Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” (Well, after all, Jean-Luc Picard was French!) There is one difference, however. Morel’s device must consume before it can represent. The holographic people that it projects were once real people, destroyed by the machine. From this antecedent work, we discover that the hotel and the people in the film Last Year at Marienbad do not depict reality but represent a separate, kind of holographic, reality altogether. Knowing that, the lack of shadows, the lack of normal temporal linearity and spatial stability are perfectly understandable. Moreover, this kind of separate reality, in contradistinction to realistic depiction of the natural world, comports with the ideals of the New Wave. The origins of Last Year at Marienbad are in science fiction.
Beltzer, however, leads us further. In Casares’ story, Morel falls in love with one of the holographic women, Faustine, and chooses to be consumed by the machine in order to “splice” himself into the holographic projection, so that he can be with Faustine forever. Casares based the character Faustine on a movie star named Louise Brooks with whom he was in love at the time. Thus, we see that Morel chooses to leave the real world to join a separate artistic reality.
These days, artificial realities are far more commonplace than they were in 1961. We have the entire internet and cyber communities like Epinions. We play computer games and attach ourselves emotionally to characters that we watch on weekly sitcoms. We “fall in love with” larger-than-life film stars. Part of our lives transpire in the imaginary worlds of pure art. Films like The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Truman Show, and Total Recall have made cinematic depictions of separate realities routine. Last Year at Marienbad can now be seen as the precursor of such films, though the idea of separate realities was so novel in 1961 that it was easier to interpret this film as pure formalistic art and high modernism. Last Year at Marienbad provides its own built-in set of contrasts. In the hotel of the film, the paintings on the walls are representations of the hotel itself – the realism against which the New Wave was rebelling. The play within the film is a depiction of the story of the film itself – more realism. Art imitating life or, in the case of the play, foreshadowing life. The film itself, on the other hand, is in the birth process of the New Wave – literally ripping itself apart from representational realistic art. Consider the dialogue from the play within the film, with my annotations in brackets:
I moved once again on my way to meet you amid the walls, panels, stucco, mouldings, paintings, engravings, through which I moved once again [I, the artist, observe the various examples of traditional realist art]
in a place where, even then, I waited for you, far from where I now stand, before you, still waiting, for him who will come no more, who will venture no more, to separate us again, to tear you from me . . . Will you come? [I impatiently await the time when the artist can join with pure art and no longer be torn from it by the constraints of reality.]
We must still wait. . . a few minutes . . . a few seconds . . . [The New Wave is on its way!]
Seconds! . . . As if you still resist parting from him, from yourself, as if his fading silhouette might appear again, [the transition is irresistible] where you pictured him too vividly, with too much fear or hope, fear of losing his faithful bond [Realism was excessively constrained by its need to faithfully and vividly depict the real world.]
No. Such hope is futile now. All fear is gone of losing this bond or prison or lie. The whole story has come to its end. In a few seconds it will harden [The bonds of realism and its lie (that art can be other than subjective) are all but dead.]
Forever in a marble past, like those statues, this stone garden. Even as this hotel, the rooms now deserted, the characters mute and dead, dead long since, who still guard the halls where I move toward you, past two rows of frozen faces, watchful, aloof, as ever. Toward you who may still waver staring at this garden’s threshold. [The two rows of frozen faces are likely the “watchful” audiences for art and the “aloof” artists, denying by the claim of realism that they are inevitably an inherent part of works of art; the garden must be the garden of pure art.]
There. Now. I am yours. [There! We offer you this work of pure art in accordance with the philosophy of the New Wave.]
Bottom-Line:Last Year at Marienbad is an amazing if sometimes frustrating work of art. The costumes (by Chanel), art direction (Jacques Saulnier), and haunting, almost liturgical organ based score (Francis Seyrig) are all brilliantly accomplished. The director Alain Resnais is otherwise best known for Hiroshima Mon Amour. Delphine Seyrig also appeared in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Sacha Pitoëff appeared in Anastasia (1956).
The VHS version of this film suffers in two ways. It is a scratchy, worn print and badly cuts the original images to provide a full screen television format. The DVD is in the preferable letterbox format but unfortunately is flawed in its own way, providing poor image transfer that is sometimes blurry and typically wobbly. The soundtrack is no better.
If you like unconventional films with the kind of ambiguity that will stimulate your thinking like a good riddle, I highly recommend this unique treasure to you.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:
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