At the Arthouse
Classic or pretentious? French film Last Year at Marienbad still provokes debate
French director Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad has evoked strong reactions since it appeared in 1961. In perhaps her most famous line in nearly 25 years of film reviewing, Pauline Kael sneeringly dismissed it, along with another Resnais film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Antonioni’s Red Desert, as “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties.” Which is an especially mean way of saying that, to her and many others, Marienbad represented everything pretentious and stultifying in European film.
But the film was also immediately hailed as a work of genius, and won the Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival. The debate continues, almost 50 years later. But nobody describes Last Year at Marienbad by saying “it was OK.”
What causes such strong reactions? Well, the film is almost impenetrable.
As much as anything, it seems to be about memory. But that’s “memory” in the abstract, not the specific memories of a specific person. Yes, there are characters, though you wonder if Resnais regretted having to include them, since they do complicate a film that might make more sense as a piece of music than as a narrative. That is, Resnais plays with a handful of visual motifs almost as if they were musical phrases: A gilded but empty hotel, the statuary in the hotel grounds, a vampirish man who can’t seem to lose at a game of chance, men firing pistols on a shooting range that seems to be inside the hotel, and so on. He repeats the images in different configurations, and weaves them into his main visual theme, an unnamed man and woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyring respectively) who meet on the hotel grounds.
Only with this couple do words really become important. Or do they?
The man tries to convince the woman that they met a year before, and that she had promised to begin an affair with him after that year had passed. She tells him that he must have mistaken her for someone else. They repeat this conversation, with the occasional slight variation, every few minutes.
Improbably, some tension does begin to mount as Resnais presents a more dramatic set of images. Perhaps the vampirish man (Sacha Pitoeff) is the woman’s husband, and perhaps he has killed her. At any rate, we see (I think we do, at least) that the man’s version is correct, and that she is likely pretending not to know him out of fear of her scary husband. Or not.
At the end of the film the man and woman leave together, but I doubt that really means anything. Time is on a loop here, and in the morning they’ll probably go back to their original conversation.
The film won’t be for everybody, and I found it a bit of a trial myself. Still, it does have something. The black and white camera work and the somewhat gothic music are both striking.
It might be more interesting to think about the influence that Marienbad has had on other filmmakers. The associations just about jump off the screen. Given the classy setting, there is a jarring zombie-movie vibe here, and critics have found links between Marienbad and the B horror classic Carnival of Souls, and also with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Not to mention Kubrick’s The Shining.
But, combined with these horror movie associations, there’s also a palpable foreshadowing of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, in that the woman alternates, for no apparent reason, between responding to the man’s pleas and insisting that she’s never seen him. In fact, if you throw in another Buñuel film, The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of Mexico City bourgeoisie finds themselves trapped in a room, unable to muster the ambition to walk out the door, then you more or less have Last Year at Marienbad.
This film has its place in film history, but to tell the truth I enjoyed watching the films that it reminded me of more than Marienbad itself.
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Last Year at Marienbad, which shows at 5 p.m Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Auditorium, is part of the MFAH's and Rice Cinema’s Alain Resnais series, which begins this weekend. The Resnais series is in turn part of the French Consulate’s annual “French Cultures Festival.”
