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As the old joke goes, in the dictionary, next to the phrase "art cinema," is the poster
for Last Year at Marienbad. Characters without names, played by actors who barely
change expression, walk through the lavish but coldly alienating vacation castles
reserved for the rich and aristocratic. One elegantly poised man (Italian actor Giorgio
Albertazzi), identified as "X" in the credits," tries to convince a beautiful but
impassive woman, "A" (Delphine Seyrig, in a hairstyle as coolly sculpted as the film
itself), that they met last year and had an affair and made plans to run away together.
She tells him, with a preternaturally restrained sense of calm, that they have never
met. He persists. She resists. Scenes shift through time and space and perhaps reality.
Any "objective" perspective is rendered meaningless in the abstractions of the
storytelling, the enigma of the characters, the blurring of past and present, memory and
fantasy, even space itself.
Last Year at Marienbad opens like a ghost story. The camera creeps through the
luxurious hallways and ballrooms of a hotel absent any human presence. A church organ
accompanies the elegant camerawork as if in a gothic horror film, ominous and spooky,
while a narrator fades in and out, going in circles with repeated descriptions of the
hotel, like the introductory paragraph to a novel read over and over again. When we
finally see humans in this estranged social landscape, they are like waxworks, frozen in
place, trapped in time, or perhaps memory, briefly stuttering to life like enchanted
statues to spit out fragments of meaningless conversation. This museum tour of the
decadent European aristocracy at play continues for twenty minutes before the man walks
up to the woman to tell her of their last meeting. "It was the garden of Friedriksbaad,"
he explains, and she was by the statues. She has never been to Friedriksbaad. Perhaps it
was Marienbad.
At this stage, it appears to be a film of memory, or perhaps dreams of a wished-for
past, filled with flashbacks/memories/stories, but which are themselves full of elisions
and gaps and even, at times, contradictory. Even the "present" plays out like a
remembrance, or perhaps a story told to oneself, bereft of distracting subplots and
unnecessary detail. It's a story reduced to abstractions: of character, of narrative, of
motivation, of scenes that dissolve between past and present as conversations span the
temporal gap and X continues to pursue A with his stories of their affair. Did they
really meet? Is he remembering, fantasizing, or just spinning a doozy of a seduction? Is
she teasing him with her denials? Is the gaunt card player, identified in the credits as
"M" (Sacha Pitoëff), A's husband, lover, or merely a rival for her attentions? What
really happened last year?
The second feature film by Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad defies and
confounds audience expectations of cinema narrative. The film is a true collaboration
between "Nouvelle Vague" director Alain Resnais, who sought to challenge the conventions
of cinematic storytelling, and novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, a leading author in the
"nouvelle romain" movement, which favored elaborate observation and surface description
of events without character analysis or psychological perspective. Robbe-Grillet's
script is filled with detailed description and even suggestions for camerawork, but
features no indications of emotional or psychological states of the characters. Resnais
helped guide and shape the story but did not participate in the actual scripting beyond
notes and suggestions, and he was very faithful to the individual scenes and the overall
structure while bringing his own distinctive authorial presence in his exacting
direction, his acutely stylized scenes and mise-en-scene sculpted out of actors, décor
and theatrical lighting.
The effect is a film that defies emotional connection. It holds story and characters at
arm's length, playing out as part mystery, part intellectual exercise, yet the very
enigma is spellbinding. The scenes are stiffly formal, with actors positioned in space
rather than directed, reciting rather than acting. They are stripped of backstory or
psychological inner lives and have no ties to a world outside of this world. (Resnais
originally wanted the politics of the day to infiltrate their lives but Robbe-Grillet
convinced him otherwise and Resnais, in the end, realized he was right.) X tells A their
story in the form of second person narration, always saying "you," never "I."
The very sets and setting become abstracted by Resnais' exacting compositions. The film
was shot on location at two different castles in Germany (Resnais could not find the
baroque architecture he envisioned for the film in France, at least not on the budget he
had) and in the studio in France. Resnais cut freely between them all, often within
scenes, to further the feeling of dislocation, creating "imaginary rooms," in the words
of second assistant director Volker Schlondorff. Cinematographer Sacha Vierny sculpted
the interiors with intricate theatrical lighting to bring out the sense of depth and
emphasize the scale of the lavish locations. The geometrically precise gardens and
walkways of the castle grounds, by contrast, become a perfectly etched and unnaturally
carved landscape that looks more unreal the more we stare at it. The outside world
becomes almost indistinguishable from the paintings and architectural drawings on the
walls of the castles: three dimensional spaces collapsed into two dimensional
expression. In one famous shot, as the sun drops in the sky, the frozen human figures in
the landscape cast shadows but the impeccably trimmed shrubs do not. (The human shadows
were, in fact, painted on the ground to create the effect.)
For all the abstraction, it's a compelling film, a tantalizing mystery and a work of
cinema as intricately faceted as a jewel. The characters betray no emotion, or at least
seem not to, yet there is palpable tension behind the riveting gaze of Giorgio
Albertazzi's X. In one moment, A breaks the spell of emotional detachment by allowing a
tear to fall down her cheek. Rather than providing answers, it merely makes the enigma
richer for the viewer, who ultimately must draw their own conclusions to the story
they've seen play out on screen. Which is exactly what the filmmakers intended.
Criterion's new edition comes out on both DVD and Blu-ray in a superb transfer from a
rich fine-grain master print that has been digitally cleaned and fine-tuned, supervised
and approved by Alain Resnais. At the director's insistence, Criterion includes the
original, unrestored soundtrack along with the remastered, cleaned-up version. "By
correcting so-called flaws, one can lost the style of a film altogether," he writes in
the liner notes.
The details of the making of the film and insight to the collaboration between Resnais
and Robbe-Grillet are explored in the original 33-minute documentary Unraveling the
Enigma: The Making of Marienbad, which features new interviews with first assistant
director Jean Léon, Production Designer Jacques Saulnier, second assistant director
Volker Schloendorff and script girl Sylvette Baudrot. Director Resnais is notably absent
from this documentary but offers his perspective and remembrances of the film in a new
33-minute audio interview recorded exclusively for this release. Illustrated with
stills, script pages with the director's notes and sketches and brief clips, it's
definitely a perspective marked by the passage of time, but he also discusses his
inspirations (he had the cast and crew watch "Pandora's Box" and "Vertigo") and
practical details, and he cites his producers as fellow collaborators.
The Blu-ray case is like Criterion's initial Blu-ray packaging, in a paperboard digipak
in a slipsleeve, with the title embossed rather than printed, evoking the main titles of
the film. With the fat little booklet, featuring a new essay by Mark Polizzotti, Alain
Robbe-Grillet's introduction of his published screenplay and notes by Francois Thomas,
it's a tight fit in the slipsleeve.
For more information about Last Year at Marienbad, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Last Year at
Marienbad, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
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