SAME TIME, LAST YEAR - OR NOT?

Last Year at Marienbad
(L’Année dernière à Marienbad)
(France, 1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais; Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Plot Summary: Enigmatic tale of a love triangle in an unnamed, sumptuous but gloomy resort hotel. The hotel’s guests are sleekly dressed sophisticates who repeat inane dialogue while playing nitwitted board games. The three main characters have no names. The woman (Delphine Seyrig) may or may not have had an affair (last year at Marienbad, or was it Karlstadt?) with the man (Giorgio Albertazzi) and she may or may not be married to the other man (Sacha Pitoeff) who may or may not have killed her. After many eye-popping costume changes for Seyrig and no resolution of the non-plot, night falls over the hotel and its lights are extinguished.

According to a flyer posted in the theater lobby, Francis Ford Coppola has seen Last Year at Marienbad several times and is still not sure what it means, quite a comment from the man who brought us the inexplicable One From the Heart. It’s also a tribute to his fortitude as a moviegoer. At its hypnotic best, Last Year at Marienbad is a piece of art, striking, original and well out of the aesthetic orbit of most movies. It’s also so repetitive, sophomoric, and somnolent that its 94-minute running time is an endurance test to rival anything by Godard or Bresson.

Resnais and Robbe-Grillet use film technique to mesmerize the viewer into a queer semi-conscious state of half-remembered dreads and existential angst. Loopy, repetitive dialogue, a disregard for temporal clarity and fascination with baroque visuals are Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s ingredients, and the recipe works for about forty-five minutes. After that, you might tire of the Last Year's warmed-over ideas about love and death and the nature of society. That the ideas are never very clear might be an indication of their insubstantiality – it’s the emperor’s new clothes, philosophy department, subdivision existentialism. You’ve encountered the ideas if you have seen or read any Beckett or Sartre, but Last Year's are clothed in haute couture instead of Beckett’s antic humor or Sartre’s intellectual rigor. The high-style is no substitute for depth.

Last Year's visuals are astonishing. Seyrig’s costumes are like a Diana Ross concert: she can’t possibly top the last frock, but she does. The most amazing of all is her second-to-last, a white feathered creation that looks like the product of an erotic encounter between costume designer Coco Chanel and an egret. The camerawork, lighting and art direction are also on this stratospheric level. The camera floats sinuously through the hotel for the first ten minutes of the film, only the first of many examples of the cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s art. (Vierny was also the cinematographer for The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, another example of beautifully photographed pretentiousness.) The use of quick cuts to dislocate the viewer are so well done that its eventual overuse is forgivable, and the film lighting, baroque and sinister, is a painterly. But no matter how sumptuous, the visuals can't carry the movie over its trouble spots, most specifically its plot, dialogue and music.

That side of the picture is torture. The music, a swill of glamorous but forgettable orchestral music and organ dirges, could be sold as an over-the-counter sleep medication. (It couldn’t possibly be addictive.) The dialogue – the man endlessly beseeching the woman to remember last year and woman’s relentless rejections – is maddeningly repetitive. His narration is just as irksome. I silently cheered every time the woman suggests that he leave her be and go away – maybe the movie will finally end! But no, he keeps on narrating... it’s a metafictional Agatha Christie, Death by Narration.

Last Year is so unique that I’d suggest you see it at least once — it’s required viewing for the cultural sophisticate and not without its merits. But drink some strong coffee first and bring along a forgiving friend to poke you awake.

Rating: 5 out of 5. Essential viewing, but consider yourself warned.