Last Year at Marienbad [L’année dernière à Marienbad] **** (1961, Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff) – Classic Movie Review 2631

Director Alain Resnais’s infamous, impenetrable 1961 mystery movie has the coolly gorgeous and impressively enigmatic Delphine Seyrig wandering about elegantly in a huge, old-fashioned luxury hotel. Last Year at Marienbad is all way too arty and clever-clever for its own good. And yet, still, it is actually arty and clever. It won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival.

There, at the hotel, the married woman encounters a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) with whom she may or may not have had a fling last year at Marienbad. The stranger tries to persuade her to run away with him, but it seems she hardly remembers the affair they may have had, if they did.

Back when it was first released in the 1960s this could easily half-empty art-house cinemas and was endlessly argued over by the other half of the audience who stayed to the end. So, we can safely say, it divided audiences, and it still does. This key French new wave surrealist experimental film still comes as a bit of a shock. And, that’s good.

Last Year at Marienbad looks ravishing in Sacha Vierny’s smart black and white cinematography, but seems utterly empty in Resnais’s and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s difficult-to-follow screenplay. The dream-like mood and enigmatic narrative structure confusing truth and illusion are either fascinating or baffling, or hopefully both.

In this surreal image, the people cast long shadows but the trees do not because the shadows were painted and the scene shot on an overcast day.

The film can definitely be very annoying, and yet it certainly exerts a strange and powerful, mesmeric hold if you’re in the right mood and frame of mind. Whatever its true merits as a teasing artwork, it furthered Resnais’s growing reputation and it also turned Seyrig into a world cinema icon. It’s not true that nobody likes a show-off: many have hailed the movie as an influential masterpiece.

The exteriors were all filmed in Munich with the studio interiors at the Studios Photosonor, Courbevoie, Hauts-de-Seine, France. There’s one other character, played by Sacha Pitoëff, as the second man, who may be the woman’s husband, or not.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2631

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