Last Year at Marienbad: Gliding, moving, always moving, glass and granite, stone and stitches that rip. In 1961, the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion went to Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais from a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The same prize went to Joker in 2019. Both films of their time: the world that embraced Last Year at Marienbad—The New Yorker, international film journals, Pauline Kael, Jean-Luc Godard—has vanished. Now the revolution is led by numbskulls. That was six years ago, and Pedro Almodóvar won the Golden Lion last year, but there are no new young or even middle-aged film artists near his level—and it’s not like Almodóvar is some genius, he’s great, but the cinema needs far more of his skill for its health. I’m not sure that Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, Damien Chazelle, or Brady Corbet have the same capacity as Almodóvar. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet? Come on.
Giorgio Albertazzi, Delphine Seyrig, and Sacha Pitoëff form the love triangle that Marienbad tracks and studies for 94 minutes. Everyone looks fabulous, but everyone is lonely, catatonically lonely. There’s an edge everywhere, the sky and the weather static, impossible shadows painted onto gravel, figures (not people) frozen in place, part of a memory they don’t belong in. The three search through voice-over, unable to figure out if they met at a resort last year at Marienbad; cinematographer Sacha Vierny dollies steadily through their sparse and confused commentary, a world of memory on the verge of collapse, something blacked out on the brink of coming back. Robbe-Grillet wrote a rape scene near the end, and Resnais substituted it for a series of four overexposed fast dolly-ins on Seyrig’s terrified face.
Last Year at Marienbad is one of the great literary-cinematic collaborations, really one of very few—William Faulkner’s work with Howard Hawks is barely noticeable, and F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wasted years of his short life working in Hollywood. Fitzgerald spent the last night of his life in a movie theater, and if he had lived to see 1961, I doubt he would’ve embraced Last Year at Marienbad, only because he lived Last Year at Marienbad. A love triangle in France is an accurate but necessarily misleading description of Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s unclassifiable movie, a near masterpiece that stands above and apart from much of the early output of the French New Wave. Robbe-Grillet would surpass Marienbad on his own as writer director with films like Successive Slidings of Pleasure and Eden and After, films in color and with more varied and expressive sound design, but it’s Marienbad that he is known for in North America.
I saw Last Year at Marienbad recently with an audience of around 100 people, and while it was quiet—not a good quiet, an attentive quiet, but a dead quiet—not that many people got up. There wasn’t squirming and forced, bored laughter. There was only mild applause at the end, but the crowd was stunned, even if they didn’t understand it at all and were probably thankful it only lasted 94 minutes. That’s probably why they were there in the first place. Or were they…?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits