![]() The repetition-with-variation imagery suggests a moment of sexualized violence, but Resnais shoots what the script describes as a relatively overt rape scene with perverse circumspection the camera rapidly dollies down a hallway, then turns a corner sharply, and enters a room, where A greets it with outstretched arms. At the same time, X’s persuasion steadily darkens into its obverse, compulsion. At first incredulous, A slowly comes to accept X’s version. And so X has descended on her like a lovelorn Orpheus, to convince her to fulfill her promise. ![]() The woman, under the watchful eye of M (Sacha Pitoëff), who may or may not be her husband, begged a year’s reprieve before running away with X. In a palatial resort hotel, a man, X (Giorgio Albertazzi), approaches a woman, A (Delphine Seyrig), claiming they met a year ago, “perhaps” in Marienbad, and fell in love. As Robbe-Grillet describes in his introduction to the published screenplay, Last Year at Marienbad is “an attempt to construct a purely mental space and time-those of dreams, perhaps, or of memory, those of any effective life-without excessive insistence on the traditional relations of cause and effect, nor on an absolute time sequence in narrative.” Last Year at Marienbad was filmed, as it were, in the conditional mood, exploiting a narrative tense that hashes together future and past. All of which, it must be said, would’ve made excellent alternate titles for Last Year at Marienbad. “New novelist” and filmmakers Robbe-Grillet enjoyed lavishing minute descriptions of almost geometric exactitude on details of architecture and décor, while hiding in plain sight intimations of sadomasochistic rape and murder like perverse Easter eggs in works with titles like The Voyeur, Jealousy, and In the Labyrinth. Resnais, fresh off the critical success of Hiroshima Mon Amour, which interrogates the mixing of memory and desire in the lives of two lovers wounded by wartime experiences, plays up Last Year at Marienbad’s elegant theatricality, pitched somewhere between statuary and opera, as exemplified by the stilted rendition of Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm that’s performed during the film’s opening scenes. Unlike the testimonials to the politique des auteurs, all the rage with the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, Last Year at Marienbad draws its power from a difference engine, the disparate and ultimately divergent sensibilities of its director and screenwriter. ![]() You have to trouble yourself to read Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay in order to glean that they’re called A, X, and M, like variables in some erotic algorithm. The poster child of cinematic modernism, one of those early-1960s event films that seemed to break every rule classical Hollywood ever codified, Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad left its initial audiences in equal measure ravished by Sacha Vierny’s sumptuous cinematography, capturing in rapturous detail every element of its chateau setting’s florid production design, and baffled by its deliberately disorienting puzzle-picture narrative, so willfully inscrutable that its three main characters don’t even have names.
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