Guests in suits and evening dresses. A palace repurposed as a hotel. Refinement that feels like another time, another place. The camera tracks through the hallways, taking in the space, the high ceilings, the ornate interior decoration. In the hotel, people often stand still, pausing as if waiting for direction. Like actors in the small hotel theatre, performing for the assembled guests. Or like the statues outside on the hotel grounds. Then a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) talks to a woman (Delphine Seyrig): they met a year ago, he urges. The memory plays out for us in flashback scenes as the man narrates, and the moments change. Scenes repeat, vary. The woman has no recollection of this meeting. A mystery without answer unfolding in a haunting atmosphere.
Directed by Alain Resnais and scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year At Marienbad (1961) has always been arthouse cinema with a capital A prospect, and continues to be divisive, feeling like the first to provoke audiences by withholding explanation and challenging any desire for clarity. It also feels like a strong influence on future horror movies like The Shining, and the cinema of unease, the influence of Ingmar Bergman on something like Carnival Of Souls. The presence of Seyrig also makes me think of the empty hotel in her later vampire film Daughters Of Darkness. The dance between the couple feels gendered. The man revealing his romantic obsession to someone who did not reciprocate or even notice his attention. Then again, maybe the refusal of the past is shutting out trauma: when the man talks about entering the woman’s room for a romantic tryst, the scene plays out with fear in her eyes. An intrusion and an invasion, rather than a secret rendezvous.
The cinematography and editing create temporal displacement for the viewer. A movement carries between shots but in the gap of an edit, we’re now in a different room, or outside. Are we in the here and now, or have we transported to last year? This trick is subtle, and becomes culminative as I felt always off guard watching Last Year At Marienbad; the disorientation only registers afterwards. There’s not so much emotional investment in the individual characters but in the overall mood of the film, the point of comparison to the statues that the couple discuss in their “past.” Frozen and mythic. Or the various paintings of the building’s outside grounds. Items of contemplation. The recurring card game that can never be won. An itch that can never be scratched.
I watched this early in the morning on an iPad, the first new movie of 2024, and I kept feeling drowsy, not the fault of the movie, pausing it at one point to sleep for a moment before resuming. The way it disrupted the conventional understanding of shot and editing relationships, artfully framing figures in tableaus and never fully resolving the mystery between the characters and their location, all of it compelling and eerie.
Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 