Even though I'm probably more inclined, most of the time, to write lengthier reviews of a film than the average movie blogger, when it comes to a title like Last Year at Marienbad, I prefer to keep it short and direct, avoid the over-thinking. It's just too easy to jump hard and deep into a whirlpool of pseudo-profound philosophical verbiage, trying to decipher this infamous enigma, and there's no doubt that any effort on my part to do so will have already been superseded by dozens, if not hundreds, of commentators over the past fifty years since the collaboration between Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet upped the art house ante higher than it had ever reached before. It may have even marked the pinnacle of a certain level of pretense and ambition in cinema, even though more radical, reductive and audacious experiments were still to come from directors every bit as highbrow and ambitious as the two Alains. Last Year at Marienbad's austere intellectualism and stylistic severity established a level of gilt-leafed splendor in egghead cinema that seems quite difficult to match without drawing a derisive assessment of inferior imitation.
The film's notoriety is based on its innovative and pointedly influential disregard for narrative conventions, forfeiting any presumption of a typical beginning, middle and end of the story. Three characters interact sporadically with each other: a woman, referred to in the script as A, is approached by a man, X, who claims to be reuniting with her on the grounds of a lavish palace and garden, as he claims they each agreed to a year earlier. However, she has no recollection of such a meeting or commitment. But he persists with such determination that she begins to question her own memories, especially as he produces photographs and describes very specific details of their previous encounter. Every so often, their interactions are disrupted by another man, M, whose possessive demeanor toward A suggests that he's her husband, though that's never explicitly established. X and M have their own moments of tension while A is off-screen, mostly revolving around M's mastery over X in a game of mathematical logic called Nim.
This odd variation on the love triangle puts A in the middle between the pressing insistent ardor of X and the cold calculating control exerted by M. We see her experience confusion, repulsion, fear, desire, amusement and finally an inscrutable blend of resignation and resolve that leads her to depart from the suffocating environment accompanied by X, leaving M all alone to find someone else he can defeat at the gaming table. At strategic points (and really, the script is nothing if not a long series of deliberately plotted strategic points,) Resnais and Robbe-Grillet insert allusions of gun violence and erotic encounters both tenderly consensual and roughly coerced. These moments may represent hints of repressed memories of tragic events (as some interpretations propose) or they just be indicative of the numerous urges we feel every day to kill or have sex on impulse, that we've tamed through socialization and a gradual loss of urgency as we get older.
If this affair between A and X is to be considered a romance, it's one utterly lacking in interiority, as we never get an accurate read on what drives the characters, what they're really thinking. Last Year at Marienbad remains focused entirely on its immaculately sparkling surface, a pointed acknowledgement that in actuality, surface is all we ever get in the cinema anyway, by virtue of the fixed two-dimensional medium. But by presenting provocative ideas and effectively employing highly stylized male, female and cultural archetypes that resonate with our consciousness, our own emotional and intellectual interiors are stimulated and stirred up, and thus moved to respond to what we see and hear in the theatrical milieu, and in our memories of that experience.
With the prestige of a Golden Lion award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, the secured avant-garde reputations of its author/auteur pedigree and the undeniably elegant and classy sets, fashions and mannequin-like glamour of its acting troupe, Last Year at Marienbad was equally bound to highly impress viewers of a certain sort and strongly irritate viewers of another kind. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet had to anticipate that, and they proceeded in that understanding, without hesitation or reluctance. The dividing line wasn't and isn't between those who claim to enjoy art films and those who don't, but rather between those who are willing to indulge an act of premeditated, self-congratulatory cleverness for its own sake, and those who find it simply too hard to digest the egotism that drove the film's creators without compromising some kind of aesthetic standard they hold dear. Or more blunty, those who enjoy having their minds messed with for an hour and a half and those who don't. Count me among the former, though I'm happily sympathetic to friends and colleagues who are every bit as bright, discerning and sophisticated as I consider myself to be on my best days, yet find the movie a pompous, repulsive bore. There's nothing about Last Year at Marienbad that necessarily mandates enthusiasm or even admiration. As magnificent as the aesthetic touches may be - the palaces, the wardrobes, the cinematography, the impeccably disciplined execution of scenario and staging - it's all equally undermined by the film's resilient refusal to grant favors to those seeking resolution to the deliberately scrambled narrative and other typical gratifications that we've come to expect from a visit to the movies.
I quite enjoyed the experience of psychic displacement it induced in me, a brief but lingering sensation of stepping slightly outside of time's slipstream into a parallel realm of immortal shimmering strangeness and beauty. Almost as delightful as watching the film itself is the contemplation of where Western culture was at in 1961 when horn-rimmed highbrows like Resnais and Robbe-Grillet could stir up strong arguments on both sides of the Atlantic by putting forth an objet d'art like Last Year at Marienbad. It seems to me that a film like this would have a hard time being produced nowadays, or if something like it was attempted, the spell would be broken by some unfortunate lapse into shock-value stunts of explicit sex or gore in order to jolt today's "seen it all" audience (at least those who seek to position themselves on the front edge of the avant garde.) The film is resoundingly chaste, when it gets right down to it, even though some allusions to more base instincts crop up here and there, as already mentioned. And as such, it's now apparent that Last Year at Marienbad, in its time one of the most aggressively modernistic works of its kind ever made, is now somewhat quaint and even old-fashioned, its mind-bending breakthroughs in audience disorientation providing a template that's been used repeatedly in science fiction, horror and other art house films ever since. It's a credit to the sturdiness of its construction and the ingenuity of its mechanisms that the contraption still works as effectively as it does. I'm not sure that one can expect much of a payoff to justify any extensive efforts at decoding the mysteries packed therein, but as an audio-visual diversion with a slightly psychedelic tinge, Last Year at Marienbad delivers a fun ride on a well-polished, steam driven calliope that offers the most marvelous views.