Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, and Sacha
Pitoeff
Director: Alain Resnais
93 minutes (U) 1961
Studio Canal
Vintage World Cinema
Blu-ray region B
Rating: 9/10
Review by J.C. Hartley
Reading
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
(1915), about a month ago, with its unreliably-narrated account of annual
adulterous goings-on at a German spa, I found myself recalling Alain Resnais’
enigmatic Last Year In Marienbad
(aka: Last Year At Marienbad), and
now, with a nice sense of synchronicity, here is a restored version of that
film popping up on DVD and Blu-ray. I haven’t seen this film for about 25
years, when I caught it on terrestrial TV sometime in the 1980s and, fittingly,
given one of its many subtexts being the unreliability of memory, it isn’t how
I remembered it. The epitome of enigmatic, this film might be said to have put
the ‘vague’ in the nouvelle vague, and yes, I’m sure I’m not the first to make
that terrible joke.
The
plot, such as it is, consists of the meeting at a baroque hotel of an unnamed
man, played by the Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi, with a woman, Delphine
Seyrig, and his efforts to remind of her of an earlier assignation, possibly
occurring the previous year at a spa such as Marienbad. In the screenplay, and
presumably just for convenience, the man is referred to as ‘X’, the woman as
‘A’, and a second man who may be the woman’s husband, as played by the
cadaverous Sacha Pitoeff, is referred to as ‘M’. The two main protagonists
meet, as if by arrangement, in various settings within the house and grounds,
and play out repetitive scenarios, the man recalling past events which the
woman either cannot or will not remember.
Written
by Alain Robbe-Grillet in collaboration with the director, the film is
acclaimed as a cinematic expression of techniques driving the nouveau roman, or
new novel, in the French literary scene of the 1950s and 1960s. This movement
favoured the abandonment of formal literary tropes such as plot,
characterisation, and linear progression in narrative, in favour of something
more closely resembling lived experience. In fact, there is nothing in the
philosophy of the nouveau roman that hadn’t been addressed in the literary
modernism of the first three decades of the 20th century, hence the shared
atmosphere suggested during my reading of Ford’s The Good Soldier.
Unreliable
narration, fractured chronology, stream of consciousness, an attempt to
replicate the actual way in which human beings experience and process the world
around them, marks both modernist literature of the early 20th century and this
later manifestation, and it seems inevitable that the dream-like medium of
cinema should attempt to replicate that. As it was, Last Year In Marienbad was seen as ground-breaking and
controversial, hailed as a masterpiece, or condemned as the height of
intellectual pretentiousness. In any event it has proved massively influential.
Beginning
with a prologue in which Albertazzi’s voice is heard intoning the repetitive
experience of navigating the corridors of the hotel in which the action, or
indeed inaction, of the film is to take place, the camera follows suit, gliding
down carpeted halls and passages, and examining the intricate decoration on
cornices and ceilings. Anyone who has seen Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), will get a jolt of recognition from traversing
those corridors, similarly the attention the camera pays to the baroque
embellishments in the palatial rooms anticipates the papal sequences in
Fellini’s Roma (1972). For all its
innovation Marienbad hardly exists in
a vacuum and the film hints at its own influences. The year after the film’s
release Francois Truffaut met with Alfred Hitchcock, reinforcing the admiration
the directors of the nouvelle vague held for Hollywood’s genre output. Alain
Robbe-Grillet, we are told, would have liked Kim Novak for the female lead in Marienbad.
Hitchcock’s
Vertigo (1958) may seem an unlikely
influence on Marienbad but both films
deal with repressed memory, psychological obsession, time as a loop rather than
an arrow, and in both the motivation of the male leads has a sinister
undercurrent. Hitchcock and
Robbe-Grillet shared an interest in the sexual politics of domination. Just as
James Stewart’s Scottie bullies Kim Novak’s Judy, X attempts to impose his
version of past events on A, who urges him to leave her alone even as she seems
to respond to him. Chris Marker uses clips from Vertigo in his documentary Sans
Soleil (1983), which also meditates on the unreliability of human memory.
James Stewart’s tailing of Kim Novak’s car through the streets of San Francisco
in Vertigo is not so different to
Albertazzi’s stalking of Seyrig through the hotel corridors in Marienbad. Interestingly, Luc Lagier in Dans le labyrinthe de Marienbad (2009),
as part of a distinct but equally convincing selection of interpretive readings
of Marienbad, suggests another
Hitchcock film as a prime influence, namely North
By Northwest (1959).
It
is assumed the setting for the film is a hotel, it could as easily be a country
house, or an exclusive clinic, at one point the man M reminds A that she is
here to rest. The guests seem to be permanently attired in evening dress,
although in the presumed flashbacks to the man and woman’s original encounter
slightly less formal wear is on display.
Entertainment is provided, a play, and a concert, the guests play cards,
dance in a darkened salon or drink in a dimly lit bar. At first it seems as if
the ensemble may be there to represent some form of allegorical commentary on
class or society, like the inmates of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). The play the
guests watch is ‘Rosmer’, which may be a version of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886), in which personal
relationships are played out against a background of political and social
change.
The
guests are often shown immobile, or engaged in fatuous small-talk, or else
recalling past events, a male guest visiting a woman guest’s room, someone
breaking the heel of their shoe, events which are later shown to be episodes in
the relationship which X insists he had with A. There is no suggestion of an
outside world, nor is it possible to place the events or characters in a
particular era, evening dress being particularly timeless. In the grounds of
the hotel the guests strike poses like figures by Magritte in a setting by Paul
Delvaux, the formal garden setting a clear influence on Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982).
Eventually,
the film reaches a sort of crisis, X recounts the events leading up to his
previous intimacy with A, and although this is not shown there is a strong
suggestion he has raped her. In a scene in the bar, A appears to have a flash
of recognition, as if a buried traumatic memory has suddenly surfaced. Nothing
of course can be taken for granted and the couple are eventually shown leaving
together, although the unspoken distance between them appears unresolved.
No
plot summary or teasing out of themes can quite capture the experience of
watching this film. In fact, as is suggested in one of the little films comprising
the extras package, Marienbad should
just be experienced without worrying-away at meaning. Formal, theatrical,
allusive, elusive, repetitive, it reinforces the dream-like quality so often
ascribed to cinema, a quality usually sacrificed on the altar of
plot-development. Intentionally frustrating as attempts at interpretation might
be, the film represents total cinema without a wasted shot or line of dialogue,
where the sets and costumes are as integral as the script, and with a score, by
Seyrig’s brother Francis, that can be as ominous as that of a thriller or as
romantically playful as something penned by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
As
befits this re-issue there is an impressive line-up of extras. ‘The Wanderers Of
Imagination’ examines the collaboration between the director and writer and how
they came to create the film, and includes analysis from actress Anna
Mouglalis, and Robbe-Grillet’s widow Catherine. Film historian Ginette
Vincendeau then looks at the history of the film and its reception. There are
two documentary films made by Resnais, Le
Chant du Styrene (aka: The Song Of
The Styrene, 1959), a publicity short about plastic production with a
poetic narration penned by Raymond Queneau, and Toute la memoire du monde (aka: All The Memory Of The World, 1957),
about the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
The
former film finds beautiful images in industrial production lines, and the
latter is full of the graceful corridor glides that haunt Marienbad. ‘In The Labyrinth Of Marienbad’, is Luc Lagier’s superb
deconstruction of the film, which is seemingly about to offer a single
explanation but then goes on to provide a plethora of equally valid
interpretations. There is a documentary on Alain Robbe-Grillet in which he
comes across as a humorous and engaging interviewee, with comprehensible
theories on literature less gnomic than some of his pronouncements from earlier
in his career. The extras also include a restored trailer.
A
final personal note on the rating for this film, as masterpieces and milestones
of cinema would normally merit a 10/10. I’m not questioning the film’s status
with my parsimonious 9/10, I just find it a little chilly and introspective
compared with some other French movies of the period.
