Summary
In a sprawling baroque hotel, a stranger, X, tries to persuade a married woman,
A, to leave her husband, M, and run away with him. He reminds her of her promise
when they met a year ago, at Marienbad, but the woman seems not to remember that meeting...
Review
There are few films that stand out as being unique and entirely unlike anything that has
gone before, but Alain Resnais’s L’année derniere à Marienbad is
one such film. Whereas most films adopt and build on previously established conventions,
this film tears up the rule book completely and transports us into a parallel universe,
to mock the conventions and show how shallow and ludicrous they are.
The film revolves around a love triangle involving a mysterious stranger, a married woman
and her husband - a familiar tale that has been the mainstay of cinema since its beginning.
However, Resnais manages to turn this into a haunting parody of this traditional
theme. He achieves this by setting the film in conventional settings, but viewed
from a very unconventional angle. By a clever combination of some truly inventive
photography and abrupt cuts between contrasting scenes, Resnais creates a dreamscape world
where all notion of time and space is confounded, and the actors appear like mannikins
being manoeuvred around the sets like pieces on a chessboard, at the whim of some unseen
external entity.
The repetition of lines and scenes, over and over again, the interminable camera panning
along the endless baroque corridors of the house, the house itself - almost a living mausoleum
- all this creates an impression of timelessness. The chilling background music,
accompanied by Giorgio Albertazzi's relentless and ghostly speech, adds to the atmosphere
that transcends surrealism and firmly plants the film in a world like no other.
To watch this film is to venture into a world freed from the constraints of convention,
time and space. It is an exploration of the netherworld where time has no meaning
and memory is an illusion. It might be the afterlife, or it might be a dream.
Most disturbingly of all, it might be reality. Just what did happen last year at
Marienbad?
© James Travers 2000
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