"Last Year at Marienbad" - Alain Resnais, 1961

To call Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad a masterpiece of surrealism is accurate, but like trying to explain the film through conventional means (narrative, characters, dialogue, setting), it misses a lot of the major points of the film. Simultaneously, to chock it up to much more than that or to try to find any of these "points" and objectively define them is not in keeping with the thrust of the visceral experience. What is a critic to do? Recount his or her experiences.

I have never seen a film that impacted me as much as Last Year at Marienbad did on my second viewing, but for that impact to be possible, a first viewing, trying as it was, was necessary. The first time one views the film, it is a deeply confusing experience. Three leads (four if you count the fortress-like hotel in which the film is set, which would not be a misplaced credit) move through a sea of frozen figures, exchanging dialogue across planes, challenging perceptions of space and time constantly. It is difficult to summarize in words just what occurs over the course of the film, but it just seems to fall apart every time a point of focus is established. In this way, many view the film as a meditation on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It is an interesting perspective, to be sure, but it can't account for the totality on display here.

Though it is certainly beyond my grasp to do so after two viewings, I can offer an alternative meta-interpretation: the film exists, to me, as the cinematic realization of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, a philosophy focusing on intentionally fluid concepts that are subject to reinterpretation each time he mentions them. One of the centerpieces of his philosophy is the rhizome, a super-structure with multiple access points through which subjects pass to create change and from which they emerge changed. This is the best approximation of what exactly occurs over the course of the film: a recurring situation of two possible lovers/ghosts/individuals on opposite sides of a rape morphs before the audience's eyes, shifting location, costumes, and contexts. The male's interpretations seem to narrate the woman's recollections, which stubbornly resist being defined by his perspective to the point of being complete disjointed from his viewpoint.

Also involved is her husband, depicted as a very rational constant in the film. He defeats opponents at nim using mathematical reasoning and quickly identifies "the" point of a statue that the potential lovers are admiring with naive eyes. These kinds of moments define the film most for me: glimpses at Renais's thinking provided by the characters' seemingly random ramblings. The film discusses itself consistently, from the opening play-within-a-film to the final moments, where the film taunts the viewer for being trapped alone with it and lost within it.

It is hard to summarize exactly what is magic about the film, and I will reiterate the position that it is best to just absorb the film, but absorbing it while allowing one's mind to wander into and out of each of the following narrative interpretations (and others!) as they become convincing is rewarding:

• the male lover is telling the truth and the woman is repressing memory or being coy
• the male lover is lying and is trying to implant memories in the woman that she resists until the end
• the male lover is the rapist of the woman, and her repressed memory is gradually unraveled
• the male lover is in a circular timeline where he steals the female lover from her husband, reconnecting with her anew each year at Marienbad (or somewhere else)
• the male lover is a ghost trailing the living woman

I hope sincerely that others can continue to become overwhelmed by this film, though hopefully not to such awfully rambly results. Perhaps it is a result of digging into a surrealist masterpiece late at night. Then again, to call Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad a masterpiece of surrealism is accurate, but like trying to explain the film through conventional means (narrative, characters, dialogue, setting), it misses a lot of the major points of the film. Simultaneously, to chock it up to much more than that or to try to find any of these "points" and objectively define them is not in keeping with the thrust of the visceral experience. What is a critic to do? Recount his or her experiences.

★★★★