LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD Movie Review

L'Anee Derniere a Marienbad

In a huge chateau, “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince “A” (Delphine Seyrig) that they've met before. “M” (Sacha Pitoeff) may be “A”'s husband or may not be. That's about it. What writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and director Alain Resnais do with these plot elements is to rearrange and reconstruct them, trying to illustrate the flow of memory and time as something malleable or amorphous. It could be likened to the “time warp” concept so popular in science-fiction, but the best science-fiction does its best to keep you awake. Alain Resnais has done great work using the manipulation of time and viewpoint as his principal storytelling tool; Night and Fog, Providence, and Mon Oncle d'Amerique are extraordinary films in which the shifting of time and remembrance are central to the films' resonant power. But Last Year at Marienbad is so theoretical as to be of almost solely academic interest; it's a standard item in film studies classes, and that's where it's perhaps best left. It was a much talked-about movie when released in the U.S., confirming “low-brow” moviegoers' worst fears about “highbrow” cinema—but everybody liked the clothes. Speaking of clothes—the emperor's new ones—this largely indecipherable movie received, in one of film history's most amusing ironies, a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the 1962 Academy Awards.

NEXT STOP … Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Truck (Le Camion), La Guerre Est Finie

1961 93m/B FR IT Delphine Seyrig, Giorgia Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff, Luce Garcia-Ville; D: Alain Resnais; C: Sacha Vierny. Nominations: Academy Awards '62: Best Story & Screenplay. VHS, 8mm FXL, MRV, NOS