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Last Year at Marienbad
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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.
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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.
Posted by al-in-chgo
on January 25, 2010 at 10:05 PM
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