Alain Rennais : "Last year at Marrienbad"
Last Year at Marienbad
| Last Year at Marienbad | |
|---|---|
Theatrical film poster
| |
| Directed by | Alain Resnais |
| Produced by | Pierre Courau Raymond Froment Robert Dorfmann Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Alain Robbe-Grillet |
| Starring | Delphine Seyrig Giorgio Albertazzi Sacha Pitoëff |
| Music by | Francis Seyrig |
| Cinematography | Sacha Vierny |
| Edited by | Jasmine Chasney Henri Colpi |
| Distributed by | Cocinor |
Release date
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Running time
| 94 minutes |
| Country | France Italy |
| Language | French |
L'Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French-Italian Left Bank film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.[a]
Set in a palace in a park that has been converted into a luxury hotel, it stars Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi as a woman and a man who may have met the year before and may have contemplated or started an affair, with Sacha Pitoëff as a second man who may be the woman's husband. The characters are unnamed.
The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which time and space are fluid, with no certainty over what is happening to the characters, what they are remembering, and what they are imagining. Its dreamlike nature has both fascinated and baffled viewers; many have hailed the work as a masterpiece, although others have found it incomprehensible.
Contents
Plot[edit]
In an ornate baroque hotel, populated by wealthy couples who socialise with each other, a single man approaches a woman. He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and she asked him to wait a year before deciding on a future together. The woman insists they have never met. The man tries to rekindle what he claims is the tenderness they shared, while she rebuffs him and contradicts his account. A second man repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man, including beating him every time at a mathematical game (a version of Nim).
Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the three characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the building and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the hotel's corridors, with ambiguous and repetitive voiceovers. No certain conclusion is offered: the man may have consummated his longing for the woman; she may have agreed to run away with him; her jealous husband may have shot her, or the man himself may have killed her.
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