She appears to be married to another man, who is tall, dour and imposing. "Next year I will leave with you." But the woman has no memory of him or her promise. "Wait for one year," she'd supposedly said.
Time is not present in a recognisable form as the unnamed narrator loses track of how long he has been there, and how long he has attempted to persuade the unnamed woman that they met before, and that she had promised to run away with him. Their discussions are empty and meaningless, yet they go on forever. We are taken on an endless stroll through the rooms and corridors of a cold, strange country manor where the upper classes take their holidays and engage in card games and theatre. These broad, elemental themes are the only ones I feel sure enough about to include in this review, which is illustrative of "Last Year at Marienbad"s disorienting effect. Most people seem to think it's about the tricks and subjective nature of the memory, and the inherent flaws in how we cross-reference events with other events over time. Not that I could tell you what it's actually about, of course. It is stately, baffling, elegant, sinister and brilliant. It is a near-perfect realisation of a very, very dense and ambitious concept, and Resnais should be proud that he and his film-making team were able to make it. Make no mistake, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. When it became clear what I was watching, and how many traditional storytelling criteria were obviously not going to be fulfilled by ".Marienbad", I felt like I had burst in to the film's aristocratic country retreat wearing torn jeans and waving a bottle of tequila around, but ended up having an awesome time in a completely unexpected way.
#LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD MOVIE#
So I decided to ignore the minefields of audience opinion (which is largely positive anyway, if wildly diverse) and dive in without fuss, volunteering to watch this movie from the 'philistine' end of the spectrum and if I didn't like it, screw it. Yes, that's right, after forty-eight years people still argue over what actually happens in this film, let alone what it all means and how successfully it is presented to us. People disagree over virtually everything about it - the pace, the narrative structure, the individual performances, the pretense, even the plot points. And it's a good job, because "Last Year at Marienbad" remains one of the most hyped, discussed and debated movies of all time. In practice, this means I will certainly read the hype, but I won't necessarily believe it. I'm happy to read into a film's artistic context in preparation for watching it, but it must be self-evident, and not reliant upon anything but its own merit and communicability to be considered a success. When it comes to cinema, I'm neither a philistine nor a scholar. "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961) Dir.: Alain Resnais Reviewed by youllneverbe 8 / 10 Experimental, visually exhilarating, and still polarising after nearly 50 years
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