Last Year at Mairenbad
by Vic Neptune
Alain Resnais followed his award-winning debut, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) with a mysterious effort in 1961 called L’Année derniere à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad). Written by experimental novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the characters, in an abstract fashion fitting for an abstract film, go by letters for their names, X, A, and M. Giorgio Albertazzi plays X, Delphine Seyrig plays A, and Sacha Pitoëff plays M. In the movie, there are two main characters, a man, corresponding to X, and a woman, corresponding to A, along with a second man, corresponding to M. M, A’s husband, has a deep voice and a gaunt appearance. He hangs about in many scenes without saying anything. He observes the actions of X, mostly gazes, towards A. He knows, apparently, something is going on, or has gone on, between them.
The film’s title, Last Year at Marienbad, clues the viewer to looking at this easy-to-get-confused-by movie as a two part story happening simultaneously. We see present and past events at Marienbad and other spas, some in Munich. Resnais must have chosen these architecturally ornate locations, with their fountains and pools, mazes and elaborate gardens, sculpted trees and bushes, for their look of separateness from the normal and natural. The entire film abounds in a sense of mounting tension. I felt disturbed by the strangeness of the moods produced by this movie. I got the impression that the denizens of these spectacular vacation sites for people who are always on vacation are trapped in their social lives, dressed beautifully of course, gambling, listening to music, taking the waters, getting steam baths.
Operating on two time tracks, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet have A and X compare notes on what may or may not have happened in Marienbad last year. Each of their memories are their own. They remember contradicting details. They apparently had an affair. The husband, M, may be suspicious of them.
M possesses an inner stillness. He may be afflicted by a psychological cold rage, as in Machiavelli’s line about revenge, that it’s a dish best served cold. In other words, don’t let passionate emotions get into it. That line means other things too, but Machiavelli scholars can chew over that dish of analysis.
X, the lover of A--if that really happened “last year,” has, in contrast to M, an impatient, at times jittery and anxious personality. We see his conversations with A in different parts of the spa, or spas, since they mention a few different locales. Their conversations are typically split in sections. A, for instance, starts a sentence in one place and finishes it in a different spot, wearing a different dress, making the second shot “last year.”
I saw this film in 2015 when I bought the DVD. I showed the film to a friend just recently. Having seen it twice, I still don’t have a clear idea of what the film is about, other than to say it’s a presentation of the phenomenon of memory, with an Alfred Hitchcock suspense vibe added to it. The droning soundtrack features an organ, playing in the background of numerous scenes. It becomes unnoticeable after a while as the powerful black and white imagery takes over one’s attention. The film is astonishing to look at. The tracking shots going up and down baroque decorated hallways, gilt-framed mirrors abounding, reminded me of the hallway tracking shots in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). That horror film also takes place in a vast hotel, a place with ghosts. In Last Year at Marienbad, the women in evening gowns, the men in tuxedos, murmuring conversations, partying, become ghosts in the memories of that “last year.”
The film becomes recognizable, in a standard Hollywood narrative sense, when the adultery element becomes apparent. The cold rage man, M, becomes the jealous husband armed with a handgun. In one time frame, he kills his wife, A. In another, apparently the one “last year,” A and X run away together. That seems to be what leads to M shooting his wife a year later.
One could imagine this film as a depiction of two slices of alternate universes pressed together. The imperfection of memory could be seen, in this idea, to be like an alternate universe. I experienced a heartwarming moment twenty years ago, let’s say. I remember it somewhat differently than someone else does. Each person creates a private view of things. This deeply affects how one remembers one’s past. Over time, we want to think of ourselves and our past actions in a good light. To illustrate, let’s say I made a big mistake that time when such and such happened but I learned from it and I’m now a better person. I forgive my past self and that self’s fuckups.
Somehow, those thoughts came from watching the movie. Its otherworldly atmosphere, the stylized acting that seems to be a condition of the place, the psychological claustrophobia that grips the characters the more the film goes on, all contribute to a sense of dread as one watches these three characters revolve around each other. Unlike The Shining, a film striking in its similarities to Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais’s film has no ax-wielding terror scenes, yet it possesses a characteristic of a good horror film: rising tension climaxed by a revelatory shock. The people in Marienbad, along with the single-letter principals, seem trapped inside this life, as frozen in their actions, malevolent or otherwise, as the ghosts Jack Nicholson interacts with in The Shining.
Last Year at Marienbad, ironically, was not shot at Marienbad. Two of the main locations, both in Munich, would’ve yielded the titles, Last Year at Schleissheim or Last Year at Nymphenburg. I think Resnais and Robbe-Grillet picked the right title.
