- Last Year at Marienbad is the closest thing I've ever seen to a recorded dream. The entire film takes place in a sprawling German hotel that is a confounding labyrinth of mirrored ballrooms and long hallways surrounded by a courtyard filled with oddly triangular trees. There are dozens of indistinct characters who momentarily become animate enough to recite meaningless dialogue before returning to a state of paralysis. The three main characters are a man (Giorgio Albertazzi), a woman (Delphine Seyrig), and the man (Sacha Pitoëff) who may be the woman's wife. And yes, that is how their characters are identified in the credits.
- The film's first twenty minutes are exhilarating as the audience realizes that director Alain Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet really had the audacity to create a dream. The narrator drones on repetitively about empty salons and thick carpets while the camera ponderously tours the hotel and the organ music plays on. The people are little more than another form of baroque adornment, much like the cherubs on the building's many strange friezes. Sacha Vierny's cinematography perfectly captures the weirdness of the film's exterior and interior spaces (that chandelier!) , and it is no exaggeration to say that the building is the film's most interesting character.
- At some point, the film's three main human characters begin to interact, with the man trying to convince the woman that they had met at the same place just last year. The other man, a cadaverous expert at the game of Nim, appears to have more than a passing interest in the woman's fate, although nothing about the relationships between these characters is spelled out for the audience. The overall effect is one of both the characters and the film's audience being trapped in some bizarre limbo, where it is fundamentally impossible to understand precisely what is happening. I'm not going to lie, I looked up a list of David Lynch's favorite films after watching this and was surprised to see that Last Year at Marienbad was not mentioned.
- So how to evaluate a film that goes nowhere and makes no sense in exactly the manner that its director intended? As I said, the first twenty minutes or so are a complete success in that they create a profoundly weird and disquieting atmosphere that could have been the basis for a great film. And then the narrative switches to half-caring about its human characters, none of whom are able to remember or say enough about themselves to be interesting. Maybe the film would have worked better as a short or even an episode of The Twilight Zone. As an experiment in utter confusion, the entire experience is successful without being enjoyable. Needless to say, I don't see myself coming back next year.
