Last Year at Marienbad

Did I see this film, or not?

Last Year at Marienbad is strange. Real strange. I'd put it somewhere between Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Inland Empire in terms of strange films I've seen. I liked it, but that's not really the point. When it comes to films like this, deciding whether or not you liked it is probably the easiest question to answer, which isn't saying much.

Alain Resnais' film about a mysterious mansion/hotel and the people staying in it is a dreamy tale of a dubious promise of infidelity. X, a man who claims he made a promise to A, a woman, that, at this mansion a year ago, she would leave her husband and run away with him.

The film tells the story by floating in and out of the past. The characters are stiff and formal, and their French is likewise. The entire film seems like a sort of stage production or board game, and the characters seem like merely actors or game pieces that serve only to get to curtain or the goal space. Characters that aren't part of the action (I use the term loosely) are completely still. This, coupled with the Carnival of Souls-like organ score and the beautiful yet eerie mansion create a gently disturbing and overall confusing atmosphere.

The strange behavior of the characters is, in my opinion, Resnais' take on the flashback. X cannot remember every detail of the events of last year, and so the characters in the flashback sequences (if they can be called that; 75% of the film seems to be a flashback) barely move. They simply inhabit the space because X remembers people playing cards or smoking or dancing, but he cannot remember anything further than that, so the bystanders pose with their partners in the middle of a forgotten dance step.

Some of my classmates may have found this confusing, but to me it actually made perfect sense. I found it to be a bit of a genius move by Resnais. He never makes it glaringly obvious, and so once you figure it out, it's very rewarding. If that's what he really means, of course.

And that's what's so wonderfully frustrating about the picture-there is little evidence to suggest that any event X relates to A actually happened, and even when he presents her with a photo he claims to have taken of her in the garden last year, we have to wonder:

What the hell just happened?