Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

I do not have the answers to Alain Resnais's film "Last Year at Marienbad." I cannot tell you what is real and what's not, what's going on and what's imagined, or even who's who and who really was at Marienbad last year. If someone tells you they can, be suspicious of this person. Alain Resnais cannot. Watching the movie and applying the logic we bring into other movies and certainly in our lives can be a frustrating experience. Madness lies in trying to "figure it out." Searching for meaning is fruitless. The movie works only when you forget logic or story and give in to the artistry of the filmmaking. Let the images wash over you, submit to the free association of the narrative. If ever a film was inspired by a Jackson Pollock painting, "Last Year at Marienbad" would be it. Except in black and white.

Describing the plot seems a little silly because for anything I express as happening in this movie a case can be made to prove that it didn't. The film certainly takes place in a ornate European chateau. Where that chateau is located is up in the air. One would assume Marienbad in Central Europe but that isn't clear. A man (X, played by Giorgio Albertazzi) tells a woman (A, played by Delphine Seyrig) he knows her, that they had an affair a year ago and that she broke it off and made him wait until now. She says she doesn't know him, that he is mistaken. There is another character, M (Sascha Pitoeff), a card shark and guest of the hotel that may be A's husband.

X tells A about their relationship trying to remind her of what happened between them. He narrates the film and as he describes scenes we will be seeing something clearly different happening on screen. We must remember what he says, however, because the episodes he describes invariably end up being shown later. In a drawing room in the hotel he tells A about how they met in a garden underneath large, Greek statues. Later, under those statues he is telling her of an incident in her bedroom. Then we see the bedroom with narration about the statues or somewhere else.

A continually denies knowing X and implore him to leave her alone, albeit not very convincingly. She listens to X's tales and is interested. She never expresses any inkling of belief in his tale even in scenes that are hinted at being "last year" she is always listening to him as if he were guide in a strange dream. Is the whole movie a dream? It could be. That's one theory and it's as valid as any other. It follows the logic of dream or of someone trying to remember a dream. Black and white always creates a dreamlike quality anyway. The editing pulls us in so many directions. X will ask A a question in a courtyard and she will answer in a salon. There is really only one scene that would qualify as "straight." Towards the end of the film M comes into A's bedroom and they talk. They seem like a married couple but it's never directly expressed. She is nervous because she thinks someone is coming, someone she doesn't want M to meet. It is shot straightforwardly and everything in this tiny, little scene makes sense and after an hour of cerebral assault we welcome it. Alas, it doesn't last long, minutes later she is shot and dead but she isn't really. Or is she? Or was she? We're back in the land of confusion.

Images and lines of dialogue are repeated endlessly. The film opens on a ghostly tour of the chateau as X recites a monologue describing it over and over again with minute differences. The words are inconsequential (other than to announce we are about to see a very different kind of movie) but they train us to pick up little things that are repeated. There is a painting of a garden that I always try to catch, "Was that the person looking at it the last time I saw it?" "Has the painting always been there?" There are little clues like this all over "Last Year at Marienbad" but if you find them all you'll be no closer to figuring out the riddle. There is a scene that is repeated showing M testing the guest in a game. It involves four rows of cards or matches and the players are allowed to remove items in turn. The last player to remove something is the loser. M always wins. He doesn't cheat and there is no trick other than M's experience in playing. Is this another clue? Yes, but who cares. The movie is like the game. You can't figure it out. Maybe, if M's opponents had a little more time with the game, they could beat M and maybe if there was just one more scene in "Last Year of Marienbad," just one more clue, it would all make sense. I wouldn't count on either.

Maybe the hotel is Hell and X is a sinner forced to relive the same cold existence in this chateau forever where no one knows him and he can't get his own memories right. Or maybe he is the devil playing with the minds around him like a puppet master. The theory that I take into the film is that X is an author and that he's come to the chateau to write his book. He toys with the opening monologue like he's trying to get the right words. When he tells A of her own murder, she stops and says "No, I must have you alive," searching for the way to finish his story. He's telling a tale throughout the movie, anyway. Some of the action is really happening but most of it is in his book or his notes. Perhaps in his mind he has blurred the line between his own story and reality and that's why he remembers A when she doesn't know him.

All of these theories and clues are irrelevant, however. None of them are "right," and none of them lead to the "truth" of the film because movie prevents it. Theories are simply sugar to help swallow the pill of "We don't know everything." When we stop trying to put all the clues together and think about how difficult it would have been to make a film like this we begin to enjoy the experience. It may seem like the filmmakers got shot so many yards of footage cut it all up, threw the pieces all and the air and then edited it together as they picked them up but that isn't the case. Each cut is connected to a piece of dialogue or image from earlier or later in the movie. The camerawork by Sacha Vierny behaves like a guest in the hotel, slow moving and looking around. The constant movement reinforces the editing which is also rarely still. The film is beautiful, the costume design is flawless, the continual music by Francis Seyrig is appropriately eerie and unnatural. "Last Year at Marienbad" is elegant but it is empty, unreliable as a used car salesman, and it denies us our greatest comfort which is that we can believe what we see.