Last Year in Marienbad: how so?

Last Year at Marienbad is a movie unlike anything seen in the movies. Many call it a cinematic experience, and it is not known if it is an experience of the public in the search for new languages, ​​or an experience of filmmakers, director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, to test the resilience of viewers.

Not that the film is toxic. On the contrary, Last Year is beautiful, with impeccable cinematography, a perfect art direction, and an absolutely revolutionary edition.

But what makes the work controversial is his refusal to provide any kind of gratification to the audience. Starting with the characters who are not even named. We have characters identified in the script by the letters A, X and M. What do these letters mean? Would they be initials? No one knows.

The plot, at first simplistic, will prove to be much more confusing than it seems. In a baroque castle, which could also be a hotel or a mansion, X is a man who seeks to retake a possible romance begun the previous year with A, a beautiful woman. However, she does not remember the affair and not even X, although he claims there was a promise that they would both run away together.

To counteract this insistence, easily classified as harassment nowadays, we have M, an enigmatic man, an inveterate player, who can be both A's husband and some kind of protector.

The action (if so-called) is all staged, with many characters remaining motionless and others moving, the few dialogues most often refer to fortuitous, totally irrelevant events that, when they reach a deadlock, are "checked" in the library.

Scenes are repeated endlessly, often described in off, the settings do not match what is narrated and the characters get involved and move away. There seems to be a tragedy or an accident, but in the end, X reports to the audience that A has agreed to leave with him, although we are not sure whether it is a matter of reality or pure illusion. As often occurs in movies.

#resnais #review