Last Year at Marienbad

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/11/2008 (6154 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ROUNDUP REVIEW: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
(4 stars)
One of the most perplexing and emblematic entries in the mid-century European experimentalist film movement, “Last Year at Marienbad” has at the very least this much going for it now: It remains as dreamy, creepy, enigmatic and maddening as in its own time.
Forty-seven years later, director Alain Resnais’ modernist, existential, surreal puzzle piece – one of the more analyzed and inscrutable films of the postwar era – seems a bit more self-conscious now, more gimmicky and a little fey in its arty pretense, partly because its novelties and innovations have been so widely imitated, although usually in piecemeal fashion.
Few films employ them with such complete embrace as Resnais’ daring, sometimes infuriating movie.
It is not unlike watching a completely ordinary narrative film while suffering from a very high fever. To even talk of a story is nonsensical, since a central aesthetic of the film involves the effects of fantasy, time and subjective memory on human consciousness. “Marienbad” takes place in a heightened, sci-fi nightmare world where knowing, believing and imagining are hopelessly convoluted.
There are three characters who dominate, all named only by letters: X, or a stranger (Giorgio Albertazzi); A, his possible lover (Delphine Seyrig); and M, her escort or husband (Sacha Pitoeff). Within the garish, rococo hallways and rooms of a resort chateau, and especially out on its chess-like, geometric gardens, right out of “Through the Looking Glass,” Albertazzi repeatedly insists he and Seyrig met last year at Marienbad – or was it Frederiksbad? – where they fell in love and agreed to reunite to make their escape. For much of the movie, she argues she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She may – or may not – be slain by a gunshot from the jealous Pitoeff.
Resnais’ team is a choice one, including nouveau roman (“new novel”) author Alain Robbe-Grillet on screenplay, Coco Chanel on costumes lustrously fashioned to suit the film’s black-and-white photography, and especially Sacha Vierny’s hypnotic cinematography, as rococo as the decor and gloriously indulgent in tracking shots long before the omnipresence of the Steadicam.
“Marienbad” is both a great classic and an enduring controversy – first-time viewers are likely to be as split as critics and analysts in its day. But to see it on a full screen again, in a newly restored print, is a rare chance to dip back into movie history and leave the theater smiling, a tad angry – or both.
– Sid Smith
Opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre. No MPAA rating (but contains adult situations).