Last Year at Marienbad
Directed by Alain Resnais at Film Forum
Alain Resnais has always been a cryptic filmmaker, but his preference for ambiguity reached a pivotal moment with Last Year at Marienbad. Heavily relying on a lavish network of audio-visual cues, the movie operates in a narrative whirlpool of hallucinogenic frenzy, painstakingly recreating the unfocused seduction attempts of a madcap playboy on sumptuous hotel grounds. Ostensibly, the whole thing takes place in his mind, presumably explaining the constant voiceover hesitant to accept events as they unfold. But figuring out the source of the story proves less confounding than following along with it.
Consistent with his other great works, Marienbad transcends reality. Resnais’ projects haven’t aged because they defy time. He’s a playful formalist, tickling the boundaries of temporal coherence through meditative nonchalance. Marienbad (which screens for two weeks in a fresh print at Film Forum) remains a daringly abstract construction no less unconventional than it was at the time of its theatrical release in 1961. Working with leading nouveau roman scribe Alain Robbe-Grillet, Resnais mapped out intricate visual pathways to reflect fragmented existence. In a luscious voiceover, Giorgio Albertazzi rebuilds the cavernous getaway of his anonymous character’s perilous liaison with a timid fellow guest, while Sacha Vierny’s elegant black-and-white photography captures the gothic terrain (actually a Bavarian fortress) in all its panoramic glory and the cacophonous organ score by Francis Seyrig completes the discordance of memory and embellishment.
In recent years, filmmakers have made different attempts to access the slippery nature of recollection. The Usual Suspects and Memento both use unreliable narrators, but they only present deeper ideas in retrospect; in form, they hardly depart from familiar turf, leaving us with standard mysteries engulfed in fancy packaging. Resnais takes potshots at realism with every jarring conceptual step forward. It’s the same warped science fiction inquisitiveness one finds in the closing moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but where Stanley Kubrick hints at a solid rationale lurking somewhere just outside the frame, Resnais refrains from letting anything seem certain.
That riveting uncertainty is rooted at the core of his oeuvre. In Hiroshima mon amour, the protagonists symbolize opposing cultures and resemble locations more than human beings; Night and Fog holds a mirror to a mirror in its admitted refusal to visualize the Holocaust. Resnais, a Left Bank director whose open-ended approach emerged as a feisty alternative to the limited genre experiments of other French New Wave visionaries, explores new worlds by rejecting the specificity of our own.
Nothing in Marienbad can be reduced to cold logic, no matter how desperately its solipsistic hero wants just that. Albertazzi envisions “statues with frozen gestures” when contemplating the hulking stone figures in the backyard of the hotel, but repeated visits to outdoor locale reveal their positions have shifted. That’s merely one of countless examples of the entrancing puzzle embedded in Marienbad’s structure. Putting the psycho in psychoanalysis, this hypnotic production turns the human condition into a deliriously cockeyed fever dream.
Directed by Alain Resnais at Film Forum
Alain Resnais has always been a cryptic filmmaker, but his preference for ambiguity reached a pivotal moment with Last Year at Marienbad. Heavily relying on a lavish network of audio-visual cues, the movie operates in a narrative whirlpool of hallucinogenic frenzy, painstakingly recreating the unfocused seduction attempts of a madcap playboy on sumptuous hotel grounds. Ostensibly, the whole thing takes place in his mind, presumably explaining the constant voiceover hesitant to accept events as they unfold. But figuring out the source of the story proves less confounding than following along with it.
Consistent with his other great works, Marienbad transcends reality. Resnais’ projects haven’t aged because they defy time. He’s a playful formalist, tickling the boundaries of temporal coherence through meditative nonchalance. Marienbad (which screens for two weeks in a fresh print at Film Forum) remains a daringly abstract construction no less unconventional than it was at the time of its theatrical release in 1961. Working with leading nouveau roman scribe Alain Robbe-Grillet, Resnais mapped out intricate visual pathways to reflect fragmented existence. In a luscious voiceover, Giorgio Albertazzi rebuilds the cavernous getaway of his anonymous character’s perilous liaison with a timid fellow guest, while Sacha Vierny’s elegant black-and-white photography captures the gothic terrain (actually a Bavarian fortress) in all its panoramic glory and the cacophonous organ score by Francis Seyrig completes the discordance of memory and embellishment.
In recent years, filmmakers have made different attempts to access the slippery nature of recollection. The Usual Suspects and Memento both use unreliable narrators, but they only present deeper ideas in retrospect; in form, they hardly depart from familiar turf, leaving us with standard mysteries engulfed in fancy packaging. Resnais takes potshots at realism with every jarring conceptual step forward. It’s the same warped science fiction inquisitiveness one finds in the closing moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but where Stanley Kubrick hints at a solid rationale lurking somewhere just outside the frame, Resnais refrains from letting anything seem certain.
That riveting uncertainty is rooted at the core of his oeuvre. In Hiroshima mon amour, the protagonists symbolize opposing cultures and resemble locations more than human beings; Night and Fog holds a mirror to a mirror in its admitted refusal to visualize the Holocaust. Resnais, a Left Bank director whose open-ended approach emerged as a feisty alternative to the limited genre experiments of other French New Wave visionaries, explores new worlds by rejecting the specificity of our own.
Nothing in Marienbad can be reduced to cold logic, no matter how desperately its solipsistic hero wants just that. Albertazzi envisions “statues with frozen gestures” when contemplating the hulking stone figures in the backyard of the hotel, but repeated visits to outdoor locale reveal their positions have shifted. That’s merely one of countless examples of the entrancing puzzle embedded in Marienbad’s structure. Putting the psycho in psychoanalysis, this hypnotic production turns the human condition into a deliriously cockeyed fever dream.
