Last Year at Marienbad - (L'année dernière à Marienbad) - 1961
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi
& Sacha Pitoëff
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It's a crazy game. A puzzle. A riddle. A dream. A nightmare. The subconscious. Set in hell, heaven, or perhaps even a dystopia populated by robots, where man has disappeared. There are nearly as many theories as people who have seen it.
Last Year at Marienbad is a film that gets more interesting every time you watch it, because once you're used to it's unusual style and the mystery at it's core you start to seize upon tantalizing clues included in nearly every shot. Not even the film's setting is certain, as everything is in a constant state of flux. What we do have are three characters, given no name in the film itself but called A, M and X in the film's script. A is a young woman, beautiful and fashionably dressed, played by Delphine Seyrig. X is a man desperately trying to convince her that they met a year ago - hounding her into running off with him - he's played by Giorgio Albertazzi. M is the woman's husband, guardian or perhaps therapist, and is played by Sacha Pitoëff. There are no other real characters in the film, only a kind of window dressing. People in the background who sometimes freeze, or only act in a superficial manner. This only adds to the feeling of dislocation and strangeness.
Reactions vary wildly, depending on a person's point of view. John Russell Taylor said "Clearly the film's creators know exactly what they want to do and have done it with complete success." A reviewer in Newsweek said the film was, "elaborate, ponderous and meaningless." I started off puzzled, and unsure as to how to feel about the film, but got sucked in on subsequent viewings. It's after becoming familiar with it's overall structure that one can finally start to hone in on all the idiosyncrasies peculiar to this specific film, nearly to the exclusion of all others. There are scenes where suddenly the characters are in a different location, despite a continual flow of dialogue and action. Other times we'll see a character in one place, only for them to reappear somewhere else during what seems to be one fluid shot. The geometry of the sets constantly change. What was once a balcony on a second or third floor will suddenly become a balcony on the ground floor. Statues end up in different places or disappear altogether, as is particularly true about one statue the characters in the film are specifically interested in. In the meantime we search for meaning, and wonder if meaning itself is as fluid as the sets and characters.
An interesting reoccurrence in the film involves characters playing the game of "nim" - a game for two players where they alternately draw counters from one of four rows. Each row begins with one, three, five and seven counters. The player who draws the final counter is the loser. M calls it a game he can lose, yet always wins, and indeed during the film he wins every game of nim he plays. Does this translate into the larger game being played in
Last Year at Marienbad? What does it mean when X always refuses to draw that final counter despite losing? If X is to succeed in drawing A away from M, does that mean he's in all actuality the loser in this game? Does the fact that M always wins mean that the events in the film are predetermined? Or is it simply a comment about the nature of film itself, it's permanence? Is the entire film a comment on the medium of moving pictures? There are so many interesting questions raised by everything we see here.
This is the second feature film directed by Alain Resnais, after
Hiroshima Mon Amour - and although
Last Year at Marienbad is radically different from nearly every other film out there, I can still see a similar kind of poetic dislocation at work. What makes it hard to compare is the fact that Alain Robbe-Grillet's Oscar-nominated script for the film was so precise in it's guidelines, and followed very closely by Resnais. So how much of the film is Resnais really? It's hard to say, because Robbe-Grillet was in consultation with Resnais while writing it, but Robbe-Grillet has stated that they mostly worked separately. In the end, the finished product was in complete alignment with what both wanted. This film is probably unique enough to allow us to put comparisons aside. It's producers were spurred on by
Hiroshima Mon Amour's success - enough so to encourage the collaboration between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, and the two decided to render their film into "a purely mental space and time," such that "the traditional relations of cause and effect, or about an absolute time sequence in the narrative" would prove inconsequential. Perhaps with that in mind, it's best to think about
Last Year at Marienbad as something taking place in a dream, or in somebody's memory. I prefer something very different, but that's what is so compelling about this film - it allows for most any preference.
Filming took place at the Schleissheim Palace (the exterior of which is recognizable to those who have seen the film,) the Nymphenburg Palace (where the iconic garden shadows shot was filmed,) the Amalienburg Hunting Lodge and the Antiquarium of the Residenz. Cinematographer Sacha Vierny had first collaborated with Alain Resnais on
Night and Fog, which was released in 1956 - and would go on to be his director of photography in another nine films. In
Marienbad he was hit with a lot of logistical problems, the most famous of which was the need to set actors on scaffolding in order to be able to capture them and the ornate ceilings of where they were shooting in the same shot. Fading in and out of locations posed further challenges and coordination, as did dolly shots over rough hewn garden paths (these posed similar problems for all the tracking shots needed in
Night and Fog.) Resnais wanted to find and use old kinds of film stock to create effects like those seen in silent films of the 1920s, but found he could not. He did his best however to give the film that kind of feeling. There are numerous instances of overexposure where light bleeds into the scene, and the makeup and hairstyles of the cast tries to create an impression of this earlier era.
Francis Seyrig's score is interesting to say the least. By direction, the film's opening is introduced with music that would normally be at the end of a feature in this era, heralding an ending at the beginning. You'll notice the same music at the end of the play the inhabitants of the hotel are watching. Sound-wise, I'm particularly tickled by the two violinists who appear to be producing organ music. Sound is as tricky and manipulative in this film as vision is - you'll notice dialogue when everyone's mouths are closed, and sometimes nothing when they appear to be talking. Is it to give us the impression of a dream? It makes us question the very reality of everything we see, and if we can't trust our eyes and ears, can we trust anything that anyone says in this film? The characters surely don't trust each other. Memories of water freezing up preoccupy some, who race to the library to try and verify the fact. X's memory very much refutes it. A doesn't seem to trust anything that X might care to remember. Geometry, sound, memory and vision - space and time itself - seem flexible in the world this film inhabits. Perhaps it does take place in the mind - the one place where all of this really rings true.
In the end X's fixation on A fills the entire film, and becomes the one thing we can be certain of. Time, place and memory don't seem to matter, even though they are talked about obsessively - only desire and persuasion, and A's constant prevaricating hesitation, reluctance and possible acquiescence. Perhaps this is what matters most - the desire and very act of seduction. These are things everyone can agree are there. We don't know what happened a year ago, or even if what X is claiming to have happened did occur at Marienbad itself. The truths are the feelings of the characters. Confidence, obsession, reluctance and fear. Perhaps this is all that truly matters - the rest, such as who says what about what a particular statue represents or if the water at a particular resort froze this time last year don't matter at all. Where something happened makes no real difference, and neither do poses or clothing or style. Everything can be interchanged and everything stay the same. Looked at this way,
Last Year at Marienbad is about the strength of it's character's emotions, which are constant in a sea of continually changing memory and details. Perhaps it reflects the human mind in a way that very few films ever have.