Last Year at Marien­bad (1961)

Here’s a rid­dle: if you took the hor­ror out of The Shin­ing and Tri­an­gle, the com­e­dy out of Ground­hog Day, the sci­ence-fic­tion out of Incep­tion and Source Code, or the stop-motion grotes­querie out of The Pian­oTuner of Earth­Quakes, what would be left?

The answer is Last Year at Marien­bad, an enig­mat­ic mind-melt that sends char­ac­ters and view­ers alike on a chronol­o­gy-con­found­ing loop down labyrinthine cor­ri­dors – and up gar­den paths – in pur­suit of a (re)solution that, even after it has been found, remains elu­sive and ambigu­ous in its meaning.

There is the pas­sion and pain of a clas­sic love tri­an­gle, the intrigue of a mys­tery, there are even hints of a rape and pos­si­bly a mur­der – but all these sen­sa­tion­al­ist thrills are buried deep beneath a calm­ly reflec­tive sur­face of staid, chilly per­fec­tion. Here, the plea­sures of genre remain tan­ta­lis­ing­ly out of reach, even if one or two of the char­ac­ters yearn for some­thing, any­thing, to break all the ice.

In a baroque hotel, as guests gos­sip in hushed tones about a past scan­dal and last summer’s impos­si­bly frosty weath­er, an intense­ly earnest man (Gior­gio Alber­tazzi) woos an ele­gant, lan­guorous woman (Del­phine Seyrig), repeat­ed­ly insist­ing that they had not only met in a pre­vi­ous year, but also fall­en in love, and even planned to leave together.

At first she denies remem­ber­ing him or an affair, but over the course of what might be days, weeks, years or an eter­ni­ty, his words draw her out of her obliv­ion into com­plic­i­ty with his mem­o­ry – or is it fan­ta­sy? Mean­while, the woman’s cadav­er­ous hus­band or guardian (Sacha Pitoëff) observes this courtship with grave res­ig­na­tion – when, that is, he is not chal­leng­ing all com­ers to an absurd game of wits that he seems always to win.

As the woman is both con­fused and grad­u­al­ly seduced by a suit­or who seems all at once mes­merist, abuser, The­seus-like res­cuer and Orpheus-like res­ur­rec­tor, we too become lost – not just in the maze-like hall­ways and trompe l’oeil per­spec­tives that Sacha Vierny tracks in his exquis­ite­ly flu­id cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but also in the web of echo­ing words and recur­ring sce­nar­ios that make the screen­play (the first by Alain Robbe-Gril­let, pio­neer of the nou­veau roman) such a dizzy­ing mod­ernist construction.

Heav­i­ly laden with décor from the past, peo­pled with stuffy haute bour­geoisie (whose dis­course and ges­tures are on occa­sion lit­er­al­ly frozen), and stuck in a 1920s that appar­ent­ly nev­er ends, Alain Resnais’ roco­co resort is a mon­u­ment to the claus­tro­pho­bic trap­pings of ciné­ma de papa.

Unlike, how­ev­er, his fel­low surfers of the French New Wave, who were breath­less­ly demol­ish­ing every received val­ue of film­mak­ing, Resnais prefers a more nuanced approach to cinema’s her­itage. For, his film sug­gests, those who sim­ply for­get the past are doomed to repeat it; set adrift, like his undead char­ac­ters, in a haunt­ed hall of mir­rors where noth­ing new ever hap­pens. It is a night­mare of entrap­ment, but night­mares are rarely so grace­ful, so state­ly and so utter­ly ludic.