Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais’ 1961 puzzle film explores the elusive nature of memory.

Last Year at Marienbad, the 1961 film by famed French director Alain Resnais, was controversial from the very first moment it was screened. Many intelligent critics either loved it, or hated it. It deliberately defied all the narrative conventions of film that people were used to. And remarkably, this experiment has never been successfully imitated. Fifty years later, the movie remains one of a kind.

Any summary diminishes the startling nature of the film, but I’ll try anyway. The picture opens with the narrator, a young man played by Giorgio Albertazzi, leading us with a strange, repetitive voice-over that fades in and out, as the camera glides through the empty rooms of a huge baroque hotel. When people finally make their appearance, a group of wealthy and impeccably dressed socialites, they move as if in a dream, slowly and quietly, posed like hypnotized mannequins.

Gradually we become aware of the narrator’s obsession with a beautiful woman played by Delphine Seyrig. He believes that they met the previous year, and he describes their meeting to her, in scenes that we see. But she, however, denies that they’ve ever met, and this only causes him to redouble his efforts to make her remember. Meanwhile, a tall rather ominous looking man, played by Sacha Pitoeff, challenges other guests to a game involving matches arranged in odd-numbered rows, a game that he always wins. As it turns out, he may be the woman’s husband. The narrator was prepared to run away with the woman before, but she made him promise to wait a year.

The screenplay was by the avant-garde writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, and part of the film’s compelling texture is due to the sinuous and ornate language of the narrator, whose thought seems to revolve around a single idea or event which he is unwilling to face. The visual style is both beautiful and utterly bizarre—it’s impossible, for instance, to forget the grounds of the hotel, with its abstractly designed garden in which people cast shadows while trees don’t. Resnais translates the narrator’s thoughts into visual terms, so details change and shift along with the sense of time, just like in a dream, and in fact the entire movie can be seen as the narrator’s anxious dream. There’s a kind of secret that comes to light eventually, a key to the man’s mournful obsession, but even that is too obscure to be absolutely sure of.

The haunting, fragile beauty of Delphine Seyrig, in her first role, makes the image of the woman indelible, and indeed it’s impossible to imagine any other actress being able to pull this off. With its funereal organ music and the depersonalized characters, one could even be excused for considering this film as a sort of high concept horror movie. There’s something creepy and cold at times about it, but also there’s something undeniably erotic. It’s definitely one of the weirdest movies ever made. I’ve always been drawn to it, and I notice new things each time I watch it. When you see it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.