Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Enigmatic, static and stilted, "Last Year at Marienbad," is infuriatingly intense. It's crystaline clarity of vision defies it's web of verbal confusion. This verbosity saturates the film with poetic narration and mysterious dialogue. Beautiful to behold, the film is impossible to unravel. Like the best of the avant-gaurd, it seems important yet one is at a loss to truly understand what it is about. Like a small handful of films and stories, it defies comprehension yet still has enough meaning to allow each viewer to conclude for himself what it may be about.

Certainly, at the very least, it is about the boredom and futility of existence. It depicts the architecture and the landscapes of the wealthy with their intrinsically hollow beauty. The cryptic, poetic narration continuously makes mention of the accouterments of this architecture. The people who inhabit this world are emotionless manniquens who rarely move or speak. The chief importance of the action they undertake is to try and figure out a parlour game which is coninuously won by the same stone-faced gentleman.

Like the intracacies of the meanings exposed here, this parlour game is geometric and mathematical. This motif is also brought forth in the perfection of the triangular hedges in the garden shown here. Perhaps the film is trying to say that only human frailities and emotions can negate the perfectly harmonious geometry of time, space and existence.

The film is beautiful to watch. It's cinematic qualities are quite unique. The vision of affluent oppulance, shot in black and white, acts as a perfect backdrop for the mannered ennui we watch the character's present. These grandiose settings are peopled by flawless inhabitants, groomed to perfection. They are dressed in the finest costuming. They look perfect, like wealthy, French "Stepford Wives;" They move like robots and seldom show emotion. The conversations, what little of them there are, are about meaningless, ununderstandable drivel. 

There are wonderful tracking shots throughout the film, so we glide effortlessly through the world. And there is precision editing, infused with unique continuity, which often moves us through time and space while not changing the emotional momentum of the scene so that again we glide. The film, as the plot would have us believe, shows that time and space and emotions are meaningless. They are disjointed and interwoven at the same time. And while they are meaningless, in a meaningless world, they are all we have. One particularly unique and beautiful scene flashes between two settings, one almost all black, the other almost all white, causing a faux strobe effect that punctuates the films theme of time perpetually both in and out of balance.

If there is any problem with the film, it lies in the excruciating music score which seems to have been lifted from a horror film. Still, this usage is perfect for the film. Intense, loud, organ music injects the film with a overblown sense of dramatics. It makes all of this divergent rambling and posturing seem immensely important. It props up the meaninglessness of the plot and dialogue with incredible importance. It does this by virtue of the fact that it doesn't fit and is extremely bothersome. It makes all that happens seem to be edgy and significant.

The plot, what there is of it, is mostly taken up by a man who approaches a woman and then continuously tries to convince her that they have met before, the year prior, at a similar retreat for the wealthy bourgeois, probably in Marienbad, but perhaps elsewhere. She does not remember this  meeting and becomes more and more annoyed as he continues to press the subject.

I can only guess what this means. Is he death? Or is he  a simple suitor with whom she had a meaningless summer fling which she refuses, now, to acknowledge? Is he God? Your guess is as good as mine. But watching and listening to it unfurl is both captivating and exasperating, like the film itself.

Note: In French and Italian with subtitles.

Directed by Alan Resnair. The film was nominated for Screenplay by Acedemy Awards.

Report Card

Script: A+

Acting: A+

Cinematography\Lighting: A+

Special Effects\Make Up: A+

Music: A

Final Grade: A+