Last Year at Marienbad (1961) [The Criterion Collection #478] [Re-UP]

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Last Year at Marienbad (1961) [The Criterion Collection #478] [Re-UP]

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Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad is now 50 years old, but it is more brilliant than ever – profoundly mysterious and disturbing, a para-surrealist masterpiece whose nightmarish scenario appears to have been absorbed from Buñuel and Antonioni and transmitted onward to Greenaway. In a colossal, eerie mansion, the well-dressed cl

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Last Year at Marienbad (1961) [The Criterion Collection #478] [Re-UP]

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asses pass the time at some eternal house party. Are they in limbo, in hell, in heaven? One handsome man (Giorgio Albertazzi) expectantly approaches a beautiful woman (Delphine Seyrig), alluding to their clandestine romantic encounter the previous year – but she claims never to have met him before. Who is telling the truth? What really happened last year? What is really happening now? All these people, apparently so replete with culture and civilisation, are utterly, frozenly empty, and the truth seems to vanish in a glittering world of misleading surfaces and perspectives. Perhaps, 50 years on, it is time to consider a straightforward psychological realist explanation: last year, their flirtation escalated into something shocking and transgressive – this man raped the woman, and both have gone into amnesiac shock and denial. All we see on screen, the bizarre somnambulist behaviour, the anxiety and confusion, are delusional symptoms. For what it's worth, that is my reading of Marienbad. This superb film will continue to generate many more.

The Guardian

In the 1960s, the French nouveau roman declared war on mimesis, psychological development, subjectivity, continuity—and most of the other conventions inherited from the 19th century novel. Sticking instead to the surface of things, working only with fragmentation and pattern, interested in psychoanalytic rather than psychological truth, the new novel was itself deeply cinematic.

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Marienbad is a direct continuation of the project: voila the nouveau film. Sight and sound compound rather than ease the intellectual challenge, and the ethical trap is the same, for the camera eye forcibly transforms us into the narrator’s demented double. In The Voyeur, the reader similarly can’t escape the eponymous role, and with morbid and libidinous curiosity is audience to, and implicated in, the rape and murder of a very young girl. Robbe-Grillet reads something like Nabokov, but a lot less kind.

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Last Year at Marienbad (1961) [The Criterion Collection #478] [Re-UP]

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The world of Marienbad is hermetically sealed, as so many viewers have pointed out. But the why of it, meaning after potential meaning, shifts laterally without losing the power to suffocate. To remain, as Robbe-Grillet so likes to do, on the level of the glittering surface, we might just watch for the decadence of the drifting aristocracy. Marienbad is a fractured, cubist reflection of Jean Renoir’s 1939 The Rules of the Game; the source material could almost be the same. In fact, Mlle Coco designed the costumes for both. (Chanel finished work on The Rules just before WWII and embarked on Marienbad not long after returning to Paris and fashion; the French public, however, had not yet forgiven her affair with a Nazi officer and spy.)

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Marienbad is so obviously “about” formal experimentation that the hint of social critique might sound preposterous, but the two are neither mutually exclusive nor was Robbe-Grillet blind to that other angle. Jealousy, perhaps his most famous novel, sets a similar nightmare between A… (the beautiful, perhaps unfaithful wife), Franck, and an absent third-person narrator (the jealous husband, present only in such details as an extra place-setting at dinner) on a colonial banana plantation. Once we get past the shock of the formal exposition, we realize the three are trapped not only by their pre-ordained roles - i.e., by a cruel creator - but by their enforced distance from the dehumanized “natives”, as well.

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As in Lynch’s later films then, we sink from one layer of meaning to another, but never escape from the vicious circle. Formally, Marienbad is style dissected; psychoanalytically, repetition-compulsion filmed; politically, the consequence of oppression. We might add: metaphysically, eternal return. Horribly, this center does hold.

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The mirror, or doubled-mirror, is the visual symbol for all this as well as a leitmotif. As so often in self-referential film, the mirror stands in for the camera itself. For example, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 (commenced 1964) “Mirror” recreates and captures works of visual art, while dipping into the characters’ lives and immediate history. The poetry of the voice-over, more than any semblance of plot, invests the movie with continuity, meaning, and lyricism: Tarkovsky’s camera is a kind of mirror that reads. In Marienbad however, Resnais’ camera only displays its affinity for other mirrors.

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Last Year at Marienbad (1961) [The Criterion Collection #478] [Re-UP]

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In the end, it is rather perfect that this 1961 masterpiece of the cinematic avant-garde has left its deepest influence on (besides Lynch, Greenaway) the world of fashion. Both are plagued with mirrors and obsessed with time. To be fashionable is to be timely. But the glamour and mystery that fashion must tap into to really excite us—what Chanel, for example, does so inimitably well—is displaced further, onto an idealized past or a fantastic future. Only something that is able to twist time into such sophisticated and paradoxical illusions can hope to beat the clock for the ultimate prize, and be deemed timeless.

PopMatters

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Last Year at Marienbad (1961) [The Criterion Collection #478] [Re-UP]

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Special Features:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Alain Resnais
- New audio interview with Resnais (33:03)
- New documentary on the making of Last Year at Marienbad, featuring interviews with many of Resnais’ collaborators (32;36)
- New video interview with film scholar Ginette Vincendeau on the history of the film and its many mysteries (23:00)
- Two short documentaries by Resnais: Toute la mémoire du monde (1956 - 20:57) and Le chant du styrène (1958 - 13:40 16x9)
- Theatrical trailerS (5:43)
- Optional original, unrestored French soundtrack
- Booklet featuring essays by critic Mark Polizzotti and film scholar François Thomas, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s introduction to the published screenplay and comments on the film

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