Last Year at Marienbad ssss DIRECTED BY ALAIN RESNAIS WRITTEN BY ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET WITH GIORGIO ALBERTAZZI, DELPHINE SEYRIG, AND SACHA PIToeFF
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“I am now quite prepared to claim that Marienbad is the greatest film ever made, and to pity those who cannot see this,” proclaimed one French critic, even as others ridiculed what they perceived as the film’s pretentious solemnity—overlooking or missing its playful, if poker-faced, use of parody as well as its outright scariness. Dwight Macdonald, who admitted to seeing the movie three times in a week, confessed in Esquire that it made him feel like a dog in one of Pavlov’s experiments. In the Village Voice, on the other hand, Jonas Mekas claimed that “the film begins and ends in the brain of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the script” and added, “Its forced intellectualism is sick.” A few years later Noel Burch noted aptly, if unkindly, “There will always be an 8½ to serve as a refuge for those who are frightened by the prospects revealed by a Marienbad.”
Beautifully shot in black-and-white CinemaScope and set in an opulent rural hotel (or more likely several, dovetailed into a single labyrinthine set of interconnecting spaces), the movie centers on three upper-crust characters in formal or semiformal attire, identified in the script only as X, A, and M. X, the Italian narrator (Giorgio Albertazzi), tries to convince French fashion-plate A (Delphine Seyrig) that they’d met the previous year and had agreed to run away together upon meeting again this year, leaving behind A’s French husband, lover, and/or guardian, M (Sacha Pitoeff). All this could be real or imaginary, as perceived or fantasized by X or A—or us—in some indeterminate past, present, future, or conditional time.
The film is certainly about a battle of wills, but whether X or A comes out on top is far from certain. In Houston’s description, “fairy tale” is the crucial term, and Freudian resonances are never far away. What many have called cerebral in Marienbad is revealed to be highly emotional once one surrenders to the film’s dreamlike rhythms and sensual surfaces, its sudden, uncanny transitions, its rude shocks. And the haunting aftertaste is no less primal: “The film’s last shot is of the great chateau,” Houston noted, “and, with its few lighted windows, it no longer looks like a prison but like a place of refuge.” Despite the pretense of an adult drama of intrigue and infidelity, what lingers is a child’s frightened view of the strange goings-on.v
