L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961)

User Rating:

7.9/10   

Director:

Alain Resnais

Writer:

Alain Robbe-Grillet (scenario and dialogue)

Release Date:

7 March 1962 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Plot:

In a huge, old-fashioned luxury hotel a stranger tries to persuade a married woman to run away with him...

Plot Keywords:

Hotel | Shade | Cult Favorite | Avant Garde | Drink

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 2 wins & 2 nominations

Cast

Delphine Seyrig	...	A / Woman
Giorgio Albertazzi	...	X / Stranger
Sacha Pitoëff	...	M / Escort / Husband
Françoise Bertin	...	Un personnage de l'hôtel
Luce Garcia-Ville
Héléna Kornel
Françoise Spira
Karin Toche-Mittler
Pierre Barbaud
Wilhelm von Deek
Jean Lanier
Gérard Lorin
Davide Montemuri
Gilles Quéant
Gabriel Werner

Also Known As:

L'anno scorso a Marienbad (Italy)
Last Year at Marienbad (USA)
Last Year in Marienbad (UK)

Runtime:

94 min

Country:

France | Italy

Language:

French

Colour:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Hong Kong:I | Argentina:16 | Finland:K-16 | UK:U

Filming Locations:

Amalienburg Hunting Lodge, Nymphenburg Palace, Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Company:

Cocinor

Trivia:

One of the films included in "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and how they got that way)" by Harry Medved and Randy Lowell.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: Exterior night scenes were shot day-for-night, but the sky and reflections of it were allowed in the frame, and they appear as bright white instead of black. This may have been intentional to emphasize the surreality of the film.

Quotes:

[X wanders through the hotel's corridors cataloging items he sees]
X: Empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets. Heavy hangings. Stairs, steps. Steps, one after the other. Glass objects, objects still intact, empty glasses. A glass that falls, three, two, one, zero. Glass partition, letters.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "I Dream of Jeannie: Jeannie and the Top Secret (#4.9)" (1968)

dream-memories

First,'Marienbad' is not an easy film to watch; and if I thought it worthwhile adding another comment to the list it was largely because so many of the preceding ones (even the most positive) start from the assumption that it's a story about a rich man and woman who can't remember whether they had an affair last year or not. That's sort of true, of course, and the film might work for you on that assumption, but I think it easily leads to quibbles as someone quite reasonably stated them - who forgets whether they had an affair or not? ... these people are too rich and privileged not to be annoying ... cinematography is unjustified by plot, and so on.

It strikes me that first of all it's not a question of simply not remembering whether it happened or not, but of not being certain whether a very clear memory refers to something that really happened or to a dream. Anyone who has ever had a very vivid dream, or even a very strong sense of 'déjà vu', will have some idea of the possibility of that. Taking it further, the strangeness of that labyrinthine building and gardens, with their carefully set out objects which all seem to 'mean' something and the eerily static people around, seems much closer to the environment of a dream than to any kind of reality. Resnais does manage to capture something of the diffuse significance of dream landscapes, at once mysteriously and terribly important and without any logical locatable reason for that importance. The significance and the mystery is increased by the sense of an unseizable past, just as a dream-landscape gains in vividness if the dream includes a sense of having been there before (or if it's a recurring dream).

This is really to say that, apart from and intertwined with the theme of memory, there's a sense of uncertain reality; is what we recall 'real', how do we tell the difference between reality and dream, in respect of a memory and even in respect of present perception, and why is it that the world around us in dreams, while less logical, is so much more intimately enthralling than the real world usually is? These people could be anyone, they may only be 'dreaming' that they're here, but if that's the case then what they're experiencing must be important to them. The success of the film depends on how able we are to enter this dream world and share in its importance, and that probably varies from person to person and from mood to mood in anyone. In the right mood, fascinating and disturbing. In the wrong mood, one might as well be walled out.