Last Year at Marienbad

Wildfire

at 5:57 pm

There’s been an error with all these reviews – the subtitles on my copy (as advertised) CAN be removed. I suspect these reviews were transferred from the Optimum Home Entertainment (UK) edition in which they can’t.

My thoughts on the film:

Last Year at Marienbad has produced a volume of critical comment yet so little useful has been said about the film at all.

Neither Resnais (director) nor Robbe-Grillet (author) are fools nor mere transients on the evolution of cinema and contemporary writing, and their collaboration has produced this unique cinematic experience, given a strangely ethereal, perhaps surreal, air by the setting – a lugubrious but sumptuously decorated baroque mansion; and by Resnais’ restless camera always on the move, no matter how slight; and with many static tableaux in which the camera provides the only movement, as if examining stretching frozen instants; a backdrop against which the plot, such as it is, evolves. The effect is completed by the use of monochrome film; and the music, specificed in detail in the script by Robbe-Grillet, a mix of romantic orchestral music and organ music varying from the melodic to the fragmented and discordant.

If the film is about anything, it is doubt. A woman and her husband are guests at the hotel. Another man appears and attempts to persuade the woman that they have already met, possibly last year, and that she is to leave with him. She claims not to recognise him and does not want to be persuaded but her private reflections suggest she may be deceiving herself. Even the man is not entirely sure of all the details so emphasising the doubt further. We never learn the names of these characters. They fleet in and out of our lives. Neither the author or director tell us anything more, and perhaps we should be thankful as that allows us to find something magical and sensual about the film.

Attempting to attend to the story or delve into an assumed intellectual mystique; to look for a linear plot with a beginning, middle and end, is to deny the film its impact, its aural and visual sensuality.

It is a very beautiful film, without antecedents and offering no avenue for further cinematic development – certainly Resnais made no more films like this although he continued with the disjointed “time” theme up until “Je t’aime, je t’aime”. The cinematography is rarely less than perfect and such devices as flashbacks are used with total justification and in a highly measured way.

A viewer will either like or hate this film. It will not suit someone who depends on a linear plot but may appeal to one happy to suspend belief and simply value the film as an experience in its own right.

Rating: 5 / 5

tomm174

at 8:39 pm

Transcendental, mysterious. A work of genius.
This is my favourite film of all time
Rating: 5 / 5

La Tristesse

at 11:48 pm

Possibly the most beautiful film ever made. Definitely the most pretentious. By the end the banality of it all will leave you quite numb.
Rating: 1 / 5