Last Year at Marienbad
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Movie Reviews of Last Year at Marienbad
Movie Review: Terrific
Summary: 5 Stars
Forget all prior claims you've read about Alain Resnais's 90 minute long, 1961 black and white film, Last Year In Marienbad (L'Année Dernière Á Marienbad, and Last Year At Marienbad in North America)- from the bad to the good, from publicity nonsense which declaims the three main characters are named after letters, when they are unnamed, and see it raw; for then you'll see why greatness is its own company. This is because the difference between this truly great film, a work of art considered an art film high point, and Carnival Of Souls, considered a B horror film, which was released a year later, are minimal. The similarities between the films are considerable, even though I doubt that the latter film's director, Herk Harvey, had even seen Last Year In Marienbad while making his only feature film. This is because Last Year In Marienbad truly is one of those films, or works of art, that, the moment it is experienced, the viewer connects with it as something they feel has always been. It is like that tune you hear, that becomes a Top 40 hit, and you swear you've known it for years.
In this way, the fact that Last Year In Marienbad has been dubbed one of the most influential films of all time should not surprise. Perhaps only Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Akira Kuroswawa's Seven Samurai, and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night can claim to have been more influential overall, and in their genres. Yet, in reality, Last Year In Marienbad is not so much influential as being a touchstone film- a film that got to a source, common to the human experience, before many other films did. Aside from Carnival Of Souls, the number of other films were profoundly influenced, or rather dipped their toes in the same waters as various aspects of this film, range from George Lucas's THX-1138 to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and The Shining, from Ingmar Bergman's The Silence to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup and George Romero's Night Of the Living Dead. Even the brilliant 1967 British television series The Prisoner and the low budget 1990s Canadian sci fi film Cube seem to have been influenced by this film in its M.C. Escherian manifolds. This is further proof that quality transcends ephemeral labeling....The film was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay, and won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. Aside from all the other schools and -isms that lay claim to it, the one it is most often lumped with is the French New Wave cinema, yet, it has only a marginal affinity with the early seminal works of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Resnais's film is very much a film that takes deep advantage of its art form's past, and subverts those forms in wholly opposite ways from the aforementioned directors', as well as artistically succeeding far beyond the art of those two, as well. In short, a difference of degree does become a difference of kind, despite the sloth of some critics to knee-jerkedly lump groups of artists, and their art, so haphazardly together. That such an utterly timeless fictive film as Last Year In Marienbad came from Resnais, who also made the hopelessly dated documentary film Night And Fog, shows the power of being willing to change technique to address a certain subject. And the dialogue, by Robbe-Grillet, although elliptical, has a power and depth that would open wells that later experimental films, like Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre, would also mine.
But, as I admonished at the start, heed not any claims for this film, even mine. See it for yourself, for this is one of the great works of art that also acts as a de facto Rorschach Test for the percipient. Those addicted to the drudgery and predictability of formulaic Hollwood hackery will be bored senseless by the film. The remaining 1% or less of us will recognize Last Year In Marienbad as the great work of art it is. Sometimes, exclusivity has its benefits.
Movie Review: Once again, Last Year at Marienbad, forever.
Summary: 5 Stars
Be warned up front that this movie will not suit everyone. This is film as art and it is in black and white; there are those who hate it and those who love it. It is subtitled in English but you will enjoy it even more if you understand French because the off voice is often hauntingly poetic. It was filmed on location in Bavaria, Germany, near Munich at the palaces of Nymphenburg and Schleissheim. The script is relatively easy to find both in French, L'Annee derniere a Marienbad, and in English under a title slightly different from the one of the movie: Last Year in Marienbad.
I greatly admire and love this movie; I believe it to be a masterpiece of French cinema. This is a work that you'll watch over and over and of which you will not tire. A labyrinthian intrigue unfolds in an icily beautiful sprawling baroque palace --a dream-like deluxe palace hotel where tuxedos and evening dresses are de rigueur . Along with the protagonists you will enjoy losing yourself over and over in this enchanted yet disquieting movie.
He ("X " in the official script --he remains nameless in the movie) and She ("A" in the official script --also nameless in the movie) had met last year at Marienbad (thus the title). That's what he says. A romantic encounter, apparently. A short-lived affair, a summer long liaison? The true nature of their relationship is never disclosed. If they did not have an affair might they not have exchanged only a promise to elope, or merely agreed to meet again a year later? Did He grant her one year's reflection time to decide whether to follow him and leave her husband? Ah, yes, her husband is there also, a witness and party to this mystifying situation; quite a dispassionate and remote witness though. Yet he genuinely loves her, well at least he seems to care about her, in his cold, aloof way that is. Would the husband know more about the matter than he lets out? In some European legends it is Death who sometimes grants a one year reprieve to her victims, could it be... too farfetched an interpretation since death is at no time mentioned in the movie. Your guess will be as good as mine.
But, again, did they actually meet last year at Marienbad? X/He argues they did, obsessively. A/She pretends having no recollection whatsoever of the event and denies everything. Of this encounter He is absolutely, passionately convinced; but her denials and her rejections of his advances appear no less sincere and convincing.
One of them must be in error if not lying, fatally, but who? Did He actually have an affair with her or is he deluded and raving mad? He keeps trying to wake up her memories, relentlessly, but has she such memories? His off voice resounds along the empty hallways like an incantation. Is She amnesic, truthful or lying? What motives would move him, or her, to keep pretending so maddeningly? Who will convince whom? And how is it that He cannot ever be defeated at that mind game of his that became the rage after he initiated the male guests.
Welcome to Marienbad! Wait, no, this is not Marienbad! Marienbad was last year of course, supposedly at least; this is another place, nameless. A sumptuous palace of endless corridors lined with gilded baroque stuccoes and ornate mirrors, icy cold in the midst of a brightly sunlit summer; viewer beware! You have entered a universe of pure fiction, your old points of reference, your habitual rationality and expectations are worthless. Already X, once again, weaves a vortex of deja vu, lies, delusions, obsessions, dreams or are they genuine memories? How will you tell? His voice charms you, draws you into his world beyond the hotel, and when the night will have fallen on the grounds you will realize, only too late that you cannot escape him, you cannot leave; you will be, as I am, one of the guests --forever.
Movie Review: Don't think, Just Look.
Summary: 5 Stars
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is virtually without peer in the cinema. It has caused a great deal of controversy over the years, with some claiming it as one of the greatest films ever made, others claiming that it must be some sort French joke on the audience. For those of you familiar with French films in general, you know that bad French movies tend to consist of a few characters discoursing about love in a stilted, soap-opera-like manner. Set against this context, LYAM is indeed a joke, a brilliant satire. The banality of the love triangle also pokes very Gallic fun at the annoying cliches of Hollywood melodrama. Part of the confusion caused by this film comes from the standard nature of the plot - our expectations about how this type of film should work are constantly set up, then thouroughly compromised from the opening sequence of the movie. Viewers are rarely cognizant of just how much we have internalized standard Hollywood techniques as the ONLY way of using cinematic forms to tell a story, which should have a beginning, middle and end, but MARIENBAD cannot be understood this way, although there is indeed a progression to this bizarre narrative, which takes the form of Man Y's increasingly elaborate explanations of what might have happened between him and the Woman in her room, which might have been either rape or seduction. It is a profoundly VISUAL film that can only be understood if you use your eyes carefully. The action is split completely from the dialogue, which goes over the same issues again and again in settings that indicate different times of day and of the year. Some of these scenes are flashbacks, some may only be the narrator's fantasy. In MARIENBAD, past, present and future coexist simultaneously. What MARIENBAD dramatizes is the relative quality of human memory. We tend to organize our perceptions of the world in linear fashion, but memory is non-linear, collapsing past and present into a single entity. Subjectivity is crucial to understanding MARIENBAD, which examines the way in which each participant in a given event experiences the same event differently. Lawyers know that if you have six different eywitnesses to an event, you will get six different stories about what happened, and this relativity of memory is basically what MARIENBAD is about. Once you know this, MARIENBAD is actually quite easy to understand and to follow, at least in terms of the "plot." Now just sit back and admire the unbelievably rich technique the film uses to explore this idea. The moving camera tracks by frozen humans, assimilating them within the overall decor, are combined with astonishing editing techniques which alternately slow down or extend time itself through fragmentation or repetition. The performances (and the actors REALLY ARE BRILLIANT - I can hardly imagine how difficult this film must have been to act) accomplish the same thing through similar means. This film should be watched at least 3 times, once just to accustom yourself to its unique rhythms, a second to appreciate the complex structure, and a third for the humour of it. MARIENBAD is a truly mind-boggling experience.Movie Review: What Mad Pursuits Are These?
Summary: 5 Stars
There is an uncertain fear among those at Marienbad (and among those that watch this film) that people throughout time do the same things over and over again. This, one suspects, is not an original fear but then this secondary fear simply re-inforces the first: that nothing we do is original, that everything we do is second-hand, that everything is a rehash of last year (or last century...). Now imagine being trapped at a luxurious hotel with hundreds of other guests who feel exactly the same way as you do: that life is merely a game, and that you are merely a player playing a part that you or someone else played last year or last century. And imagine not being able to escape from this feeling. This is the world of Marienbad.
For some this film will seem tedious, but others will be seduced by the elegant trap that is Marienbad. For those who allow themselves to be seduced, the film draws you in down impossibly long corridors and down impeccably groomed garden paths, and the narrator draws you into an obsessive story where every statue, every mirror, and every half-remembered detail is yet another reminder that reality is merely a fabrication, a fantasy, and perhaps a fantasy of someone else's devising.
The narrator is an obsessive lost soul searching for a lost love reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo but this is a highly cultivated Jimmy Stewart versed more in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges than he is in American films and culture. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that this is the story of one very cultivated man's attempt to escape the plotted paths of history, of art, and of human destiny. In this way Last Year at Marienbad becomes a poignant examination of man's tragic self-awareness.
The film succeeds because it intrigues the viewer on so many levels at once: its a mysterious gothic masterpiece about a romance that did or did not take place within the elegant confines and corridors of a darkly luxurious hotel, its a Jamesian psychological masterpiece that takes place within the corridors of one man's haunted and or unstable subconscious, and its an elaborate piece of meta-fiction that allows the viewer to construct his/her own readings and meanings.
The film is really unlike any other. Ultimately what you have in Last Year at Marienbad is an interesting collision of literary and cinematic sensibilities. Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the script based on his novel and Alain Resnais directed but the end result seems less like a collaboration than a strange alchemical accident.
I've seen the film several times now and it never ceases to allure me with its dream-like structures and repetitions and its unsolvability. The film seems to hold the very key to what we are all searching for inside and outside of time, in art and in life. If the film remains a timeless piece of art its because maybe all men and women in all times and places are looking for the same unnameable thing.
Perhaps.
Movie Review: Just Listen
Summary: 5 Stars
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is unique in so many ways that it is difficult to know where to start to describe it. Perhaps the most fruitful is to note that it is certainly one of the most elegantly crafted films ever made. A former editor, director Alain Resnais's work always has a peerless sense of rhythm; his images seem to dance effortlessly across the screen. He is helped considerably here by his cinematographer, Sacha Vierny (perhaps better known now for his collaborations with Peter Greenaway), who bathes the film in a soft, opalescent light. (The glacially smooth camera movements anticipate the Steadicam by fifteen years.)Glowing in this pearly light is designer Jacques Saulnier's vaguely disquieting and ambivalently luxurious Rococo hotel. The film seamlessly combines locations and sound stage sets into an all-embracing, chilly whole. The white walls, gilded chinoiserie details and marble floors lend the film a candy-box charm. Opening the box yields not sweet confections, however, but a nearly claustrophobic totality, a fantasized projection entirely in keeping with novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet's obsessive, repetitive writing. As the camera glides down the immaculate hallways, it does not so much illustrate Robbe-Grillet's text, or even build an environment in which it can be recited, as create a visual equivalent to *listening to* a sinuously rhythmed, incantatory, sentence like "...le long de ces couloirs,-à travers ces salons, ces galeries, dans cette construction d'un autre siècle, cet hôtel immense, luxueux, baroque,-lugubre, où des couloirs interminables, succèdent aux couloirs,..."
I am not fluent in French, and I cannot translate these lines. That is part of the point. You can enjoy MARIENBAD without understanding the language. Indeed, it may be better if you do not, since you are less likely to worry about what it "means" and to enjoy it simply for its musical rhythm and texture. In fact, I strongly recommend that you turn off the subtitles on your DVD and allow yourself to bask in the film's rich aural tonalities.
The filmmakers have no difficulty involving us sensually, but they are indifferent to engrossing us emotionally. While each of the principles is remarkably controlled, even witty, their "characterizations" are flat and diagrammatic. The "story" of MARIENBAD is our response to the film's unfolding. Sight, sound, texture, voice and sensation are its real subject. For those willing to experience it without prejudice, MARIENBAD is fantastically rewarding, ever-changing. For those who insist on asking "what does it mean?" or "did they or did they not really meet last year?" expect only confusion, frustration, bafflement and disappointment.