Review #589: 'Last Year at Marienbad' (1961)

Last Year at Marienbad has beguiled and bewildered audiences since its release, with its enigmatic, elliptical, dream-like narrative structure. It was director Alain Resnais' second fiction feature, and one that explored the same themes of the power and fragility of memory that were present in his debut fiction film, Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), along with the haunting documentary short, Night and Fog (1955). Opening in the baroque interior of an anonymous hotel in the countryside, the camera floats through the corridors, into a room of absent people, watching a piece of theatre. As the show ends, the audience split into social groups, the camera snaking through the groups catching fragments of conversation, chatter that constantly repeats itself, as if in perpetual loop. Throughout the film, the unnamed man (Giorgio Albertazzi) excessively attempts to convince an unnamed woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they had met there, perhaps last year. The woman is unconvinced of this claim, but is never thoroughly sure if the event happened. Another man who may or may not be her husband (Sacha Pitoeff) challenges the man to mathematical parlour games, which seem like an intellectually aggressive sexual power game.

Constantly referenced throughout the film is the sense that the very same group of people attend this hotel annually, repeating the same conventions and processes each year, as if nothing changes from year to year. It's an almost Surrealist or Dada reaction to bourgeois trappings, the constant repetition of pomp and ceremony. The fragments of conversation are largely mundane descriptions, or meaningless chip-chat between rich clientele. When the mysterious structure, set within the annually visited hotel, offers forms of entertainment, the bourgeois audience vapidly and vacantly stare into space, they are separated from both the other members, but also detached from the events on stage, and within the narrative. Attacking the vulgarity of "high" culture's spectators by suggesting that they simply fill their time with such activities, as opposed to immersing themselves within the beauty of the art, is an aspect of the film that seems influenced by the surrealist and dada films of Man Ray, Hans Richter or Jean Cocteau (although Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet were never a part of either of these movements).

Whilst these bourgeois attacks consistently formulate the background of the film, the main protagonists occupy the same space, but a space that is further fragmented by their own annual trappings. As the man insists to the woman that they met there the year before, and were planning on leaving together, their conversations are set in different temporal space. Through each sentence of speech the film cuts to the rest of the dialogue in a separate place to previously. So whilst the woman has no memory of this supposed meeting, the cutting up of each conversation places his own memories in another space to the one they occupied the year before (perhaps). The repetition of dialogue and space suggests also that this could be a narrative of the afterlife, a suspended purgatory, where class still matters, and the suspended characters simply repeat the same process until further acceptance into the afterlife. The man could simply be attempting to help a loved one remember after losing it at death.

Beautifully shot in black and white widescreen, with sumptuous cinematography, the technical aspects of the film are undeniably stunning. But, like Hiroshima, mon amour and Night and Fog, Last Year at Marienbad is a powerful, if slightly mystifying, film about memory and ultimately loss. In the central protagonists of these films, is a poetic glimpse into fragile, even damaged memories, and the issues caused to it by circumstance. In Hiroshima.. it was the devastation of history and the problems of memory from alternative perspectives, in Marienbad it is the pressures of conforming to the prevailing societal structures that cause problems with memory, perhaps clouding it with formulaic, normalising functions.


Directed by: Alain Resnais
Starring: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff
Country: France/Italy

Rating: *****

Marc Ivamy