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This radical experiment in film form by director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet was a surprising commercial success in 1961, even in the U.S., and it's been a rallying point for the possibilities of formal filmmaking ever since. A highly seductive parable about seduction, it's set in and around a baroque European chateau/hotel, where the nameless hero (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to persuade the nameless heroine (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year. Shot by Sacha Vierny in otherworldly black-and-white 'Scope, it oscillates ambiguously between past, present, and various conditional tenses, mixing memory and fantasy, fear and desire. The overall tone is poker-faced parody of lush Hollywood melodrama, yet the film's dreamlike cadences, frozen tableaux, and distilled surrealist poetry are too eerie, too terrifying even, to be shaken off as camp. For all its notoriety, this masterpiece among masterpieces has never really received its due. In French with subtitles. 93 min. By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Sorry there are no showtimes for Last Year at Marienbad on Monday, May 21.

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4.4 out of 5

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Alain Resnais’ “Last Year in Marienbad” (1960) is a barely possible comedy about the pompous cult of romantic love we all carry in our hearts. At first the film lures us into a love with romantic love only to overwhelm us by the stylistic embellishments ecstatic love expects from the storyteller, and then it suddenly introduces subversive intonations which leaves you still being in love with love but simultaneously confused and disoriented. Resnais’ directorial power of making visual images whisper, talk, sing and scream is equal to his craft of making audio images a contrapuntal addition to them when both are addressing not only viewer’s soul but his/her mind which answers with positive (creative) puzzlement triggering farther intellectual concentration. The reality status of last year in Marienbad as a place of meeting of two hypothetical lovers (X and A) in the past which the main protagonist X tries to suggest to the woman (A) who personifies his yearning for love, cannot be verified. Strong love is never the first time although it seems like it is – it is always prepared by the forgotten past experiences or dreams and unconscious desires. As a person who has watched this film repeatedly during at least thirty five years I can assure the potential audience that to experience it means to participate in a process which is never stopping to trigger your emotions and returning to you again and again always fresh, impressive and challenging, like the need to love. Actors incarnating the three angles of a love triangle (“lover”, “husband” and the “wife/mistress”) – are simultaneously realistic and capable of stylizing human emotions which are easily recognizable but, on the other hand, enigmatic and open to the mystery.

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Posted by actingoutpolitics on 03/21/2011 at 9:47 AM

An excellent capsule review, but it wasn't really composed on January 25 of the year 2010, was it?

The film is slowly getting its due. Probably more film schools would rather show the more accessible HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR to an introductory class, but LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD has staying power, too!

And if you think MARIENBAD has had no influence, consider MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

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Posted by al-in-chgo on 01/25/2010 at 10:05 PM
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