“OPEN TO INTERPRETATION”

By Raymond Benson

Last Year at Marienbad should have had the marketing tagline: “Open to Interpretation,” for the film belongs at the top of a list entitled Movies That Make You Go ‘Huh??’

Alain Resnais’ enigmatic, surreal, and puzzling experimental picture from 1961, the follow-up to his acclaimed Hiroshima mon amour (1959), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The picture has been simultaneously praised and reviled since its release because audiences generally don’t know what to make of it.

Yes, it’s beautiful to look at. The cinematography by Sacha Vierny is magnificent in its black and white, widescreen splendor. The settings at such Baroque palaces as Nymphenburg and Schleissheim in Munich evoke a mysterious past that might be an alternate timeline. The music by Francis Seyrig might belong in a creepy cathedral with its gothic horror organ. The pace is slow, but the picture constantly moves with the radical editing of the French New Wave (albeit of the Left Bank school, which maintained a more refined sensibility than the rebellious Right Bank upstarts like Godard and Truffaut). The endless tracking shots are remarkably fluid and smooth, seeing that the movie was made long before the invention of the Steadicam.

What’s it about? We’re in a “hotel” with upper class, formally dressed guests who play strange table games and speak in elliptical, often repetitive phrases. An unnamed man (Giorgio Albertazzi) is stalking an unnamed woman (the gorgeous Delphine Seyrig) throughout the corridors, rooms, and gardens, attempting to convince her that they met “last year” and were to get together again this year, but she continually denies the encounter. Another unnamed man (Sacha Pitoëff), who may be her husband, appears to be aware of the possible cuckolding, and therefore attempts to dominate the lover with his prowess in the games played in the hotel. Something surely occurred between the man and the woman—an assault, perhaps?—but we’re never really positive. Maybe she ran off with the guy and left her husband. Again, we can’t be certain.

Or one viable interpretation is that these people are all ghosts and they’re trapped in a looping hell of unfulfillment.

The preceding scenario is replicated throughout the 94-minute run time in various configurations of composition, costuming, and spaces. The ultimate effect is hypnotic, perpetuating the notion that the movie is a dream—but whose is unclear. The temporal logic is textbook surrealism, in which an artist attempts to evoke the structure of dreams.

Alain Resnais has always played with the themes of unreliable memory and the flexibility of time as it pertains to our pasts. Last Year at Marienbad could be his quintessential work in that regard. Allegedly it was a huge influence on Stanley Kubrick for The Shining, but one can see its stimulus in such works as Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

In short, the movie can be fascinating, mysterious, and striking in its presentation and execution; but at the same time tedious, frustrating, and impenetrable.

The perfect date movie!

Kino Lorber has released a top-notch edition with a 4K 1920x1080p restoration that looks spectacular, and a 2.0 mono soundtrack in French with optional English subtitles. There is an audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas.

The supplements are especially interesting. Acclaimed director Volker Schlöndorff worked as an assistant and interpreter on the film. Schlöndorff presents a captivating interview about the making of the picture, as well as narrates a nearly-hour-long assembly of behind-the-scenes 8mm footage shot by the continuity person. Most helpful and informative is the 50-minute visual essay, Last Year at Marienbad A to Z, by James Quandt (programmer for the TIFF Cinematheque). It’s a lesson in filmmaking. There’s also a 1956 short film by Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde, trailers, and a small illustrated booklet with an essay by Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins.

The final verdict—Last Year at Marienbad deserves to be seen by any serious students of film history who are willing to delve into the unknown and unconventional, but they should be prepared to put on their thinking caps.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON