Last Year at Marienbad is a perplexing art film that openly eschews any attempt to be a conventional, passive experience. It's become as famous for its objective iconography as the sharply-divided critical response. The most concrete the movie gets is that a man tries to convince a woman that they met a year before. Another man appears to be protective of the woman. Trying to sort out any sort of conventional chronology is futile. Is the movie happening in the present tense with flashbacks? Is it a frenzied rush of repressed, traumatic memories? It's one thing and everything at once, and it's immensely frustrating and fascinating at the same time.
I went into my first viewing (while in college at a friend's house) as blind as possible. After having seen it twice more, I'm not sure I've gotten much more out of it than I did on my initial viewing. Then and now it feels to me like a feverish explosion of repressed memories and trauma, which has become a popular opinion over the years. If you're looking for a linear narrative (or anything resembling it), this is the wrong movie to watch. The dynamic nature of Alain Robbe-Grillet's script leaves the viewer unable to predict what will come next with any degree of certainty. It's hard to imagine this film finding an audience in an age before home video, where re-watching the film would require another trip to the cinema.
Alain Resnais' film retains its title as one of the most loved or hated films of all time. Pauline Kael railed against it. Michael Medved called it one of the 50 Worst Movies of All Time. Just this week a friend asserted his love of it and couldn't articulate why. I wouldn't be surprised if his reason was as simple as "it makes me seem sophisticated and cool." I only like it for two reasons: it's gorgeous to look at and it's so adept at provoking anger and exasperation from others. Anyone who says they love the "perfection" of it is full of shit if you ask me. Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour) and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet were trying some unconventional things and intended for it to be amorphous.
Resnais (l.) and Robbe-Grillet (r.)
Not a single other release this month features the amount and quality of immersive supplemental material as Marienbad, as one could easily expect of Criterion. The centerpiece of the extras is a new audio interview with Resnais [33:04]. He opens up about differences of opinion the production team had as if he had just wrapped the last day of photography and were talking to his closest confidante.
The interview is complimented by two featurettes, Unraveling the Enigma: The Making of Marienbad [32:36] and Ginette Vincendeau on Last Year at Marienbad [22:59].
Color production stills from Unraveling the Enigma: The Making of Marienbad
The former includes interviews with Assistant Directors, the Script Girl (how progressive), and various Resnais collaborators. Film scholar Ginette Vincendeau's piece is frank about the movie's reputation as possibly the most overhyped, over-praised art film in history. It also makes some interesting observations about possible interpretations.
My favorite extras are two Resnais-directed documentary shorts. Toute la Memoire Du Monde (1956) [20:57] is a gorgeous, though brief tour through the French National Archives. The photography makes it look like some sort of heist thriller, and it made me wish the director of Taken would craft something like that in the modern-day archives.
I was so taken by this one, I've watched it three times now. The labyrinthine halls and endless shelves of books, papers, scrolls, and other documents are absolutely mesmerizing. The first time I watched it, I was half-distracted thinking of how different this place must be now with the advent of digital cataloguing. The second time, I got pause-button-happy and skipped back and went frame by frame in places. The third I just let it wash over me. It's exquisite, and still relevant all these decades later.
Le Chant Du Styrene (1958) [13:40] is a more playful look at the production of polystyrene-based (plastic) goods in France. It's the kind of short educational film I wish I'd seen in school, subtitles and all, instead of the really lousy stuff we were stuck with. Styrene sneaks scientific knowledge in to pretty pictures and jovial narration, which is why, as with Du Monde, it doesn't feel its age.
My favorite feature of the Director-Approved edition is that Alain Resnais requested that Criterion include the original, non-remastered Mono audio, hisses, artifacts and all.
Criterion has made Last Year at Marienbad available on both DVD and Blu-ray. A little blue sticker is the only way to tell them apart aside from the disc format noted on the back cover. As has been the case of late, the price of the Blu-ray ($25.99) is lower than the DVD ($34.99). For the purpose of this review, I watched and screencapped the DVD. Based on the picture quality alone, I can't quite wrap my head around how it could look better, but I'm sure they managed it somehow.
Even though I nearly dismissed the movie earlier on as not much more than a conversation piece, I've watched it a third time since I started drafting this review. Maybe I like it more than I think I do.
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