The great spa towns of Europe
A review requested by Hoffnungshaftling, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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Last Year at Marienbad is to the midcentury European art film as Singin in the Rain is to the Hollywood studio film or October is to pre-Stalinist Soviet film: it is the apotheosis of an entire conceptual approach to filmmaking. We can point to other films that represented a more radical break with what had gone before; we can probably point to films that are more pleasant to watch; we cannot, I don't think, point to films that are more art film. Narrative ambiguity, psychological realism, a grounding in state-of-the-art Continental philosophy and postmodern theory, focus on the material qualities of cinema, it's all there in abundance.
It's the kind of film that cannot be described in even the loosest way without immediately diving into some of the most utterly florid, pretentious terminology. This is, in part, because it is inscrutable. It did not invent being inscrutable, of course, but it maybe the the film its of era where inscrutability is most obviously "the point". It does for narrative ambiguity what Le Million did for sound, The Wizard of Oz did for Technicolor, or what Ben-Hur did for widescreen: it takes a fairly new development in cinema and push it to the farthest extreme it can be taken, making that innovation the focal point of its storytelling and spectacle. One could easily get lost in the question of "what happens" in Last Year at Marienbad - or, to be more precise, what happened, given that the film's subject matter is famously the instability of memory - but that is very much a trap, I think. We should maybe take nothing about Marienbad at face value, including the things its creators said outside of the film, but I would appeal to the authority of Alain Robbe-Grillet, most important as a novelist, where he spearheaded the Nouveau roman literary movement in the late '50s and '60s, but who also wrote the screenplay for this film. And wrote the screenplay as a film, including detailed suggestions about the visuals and camerawork that were largely adopted by the actual director, Alain Resnais, who was stranger neither to working with major, artistically revolutionary novelists, nor with films that deal with highly ambiguous psychological states and unconventional narrative (his only prior feature was 1959's Hiroshima mon amour, written by Marguerite Duras). The same year as the film's release, Robbe-Grillet published his screenplay as a "cine-novel", writing an introduction where he said, among other things:
In other words, we have been given permission by one-half of the film's authorial voice (both Robbe-Grillet and Resnais were consistent, in the years that followed, in declaring this a perfectly-matched collaboration between them) to not bother trying to "solve" Last Year at Marienbad, and I am very sorry if it seems like taking the easy way out, but I think I should like to take him up on that offer. It truly does feel to me like the film is opaque not as a way of being obnoxious, or of creating a puzzle to solve, but because opacity is itself the film's subject matter. Not even just the opacity of the story, where the central conflict is whether one character's recollections of past events is correct or not; if not, is it because he's mistaken, hallucinating, or lying; if yes, then why is the person he's trying to convince so confident that he's wrong. Talking about the film's narrative is easier, as so many things are, if we take our cues from 1920s Russian literary theory, and the paired concepts of fabula and syuzhet: at the risk of making a very, very complex framework of ideas much too simple, fabula is essentially the "content" of a story, what happened but also what it means and how it feels; syuzhet is is the way the story is structured and presented. Sometimes this gets rendered as "story" versus "plot", though fabula and syuzhet are somewhat looser and more expansive than those words. It can be (and has been) said that syuzhet follows fabula, that the elements of the story precede the decision about how to organize them; it can be (and has been) said that fabula is generated from syuzhet, that the organization is what gives meaning and definition to the material that we interpret as "the story".
Last Year at Marienbad is in some ways an experiment (indeed, if we say there is a hard-and-fast line separating "experimental" film from "narrative" film - as I'm not inclined to do - I truly do not know what side of that line Marienbad would better fit on) in exploring what happens when syuzhet is not used to organize fabula: when, maybe, there is no fabula to organize at all. I say "in some ways", because I don't suppose that Robbe-Grillet and Resnais were thinking in those terms. I mean, certainly not in the terms "fabula" and "syuzhet", which I don't believe were at all in use in the West at that point. Not in terms of "let's run an experiment". I rather think that they were trying to make a film in which the presentation of the story was the story, that "what happened last year in Marienbad" is immaterial, and that what actually matter is the way that the unstable, incoherent "present" is patterned by the editing and by the compositions, by the way that (apparent?) flashbacks are interwoven with it, by the sensations driven by pure aesthetics, and how those manifest as emotional states that we can connect to the seeming events of the plot. It is not, emphatically not, a "style over substance" movie, since the style is clearly expressive in ways that bring us closer to the characters. It's more that it's about style doing the work of substance, in substance's absence. To use a different term in a register about as far from Soviet literary theory as I think it is possible to go: it's basically a "vibes" movie.
The questions then become, what are those vibes? How are they built? How do they make us feel? And I'm not really able to answer those questions, because that's what watching Last Year at Marienbad is, experiencing those questions and the ideas they lead to in real time. Notwithstanding Robbe-Grillet's reference to "the passion of the characters", this is an extraordinarily chilly film that resides almost solely at the level of intellectual experience, and I say that even as I find it to be exhilarating thing to watch and feel like my brain needs to be cooled down at some length when the film's 94 minutes have run their course (this review is, for the record, based on the third time I watched the film, the second time I loved it - the first time I was much too young and much too unready for this kind of free-floating anti-narrative formal play, and hated the shit out of it. That is to say, you shouldn't see Last Year at Marienbad because you're "meant to". Even as a huge fan of this and Resnais in general, this isn't a film to watch if you're not in perfectly the right mood to deal with its aggressively frustrating oblique qualities). It's emotionally transporting in the way that beautiful things are, and the emotions it stirs up are heavy and terrifying, but it's also something where you more think "I am having a feeling" than you have the feeling.
That being said, there are some basic observations it's possible to make. Such as the concrete story elements: in a very fancy estate in Europe that is possibly functioning now as a spa and hotel, a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) is convinced that a woman (Delphine Seyrig) is the person he had an affair with at a similar spa and hotel last year - probably not even at Marienbad, he at first seems confident it was Frederiksbad. She denies it, though he's convinced this is because she doesn't want to incur the wrath of a gaunt-faced second man (Sacha Pitoëff) who looks like a mummified version of Humphrey Bogart and may be the woman's husband. In Robbe-Grillet's cine-novel, these three characters were referred to, respectively, as X, A, and M, and sometimes critics do the same, for convenience's sake. More convenient still to not bother talking about the characters at all, since I think there's an excellent chance that none of them are real, or at least that A and M aren't. Someone is doing all of the whispery, spidery narration that keeps rising and falling volume on the soundtrack, and whether that person is X or not, he speaks with X's voice. The narration, I think, is one of the film's main devices for both feigning that it can be interpreted and then refusing to let us do so: we keep getting pieces of sentences, often full thoughts even, but he's also often mumbling down so low in the mix that you can only pick out occasional consonant sounds.
So is the narration the key to what's going on, or just a surface-level element of style, a way of pressing a kind of morbid feeling on the film (when we can clearly make it out, he's generally saying haunted, desperate things) that isn't really connected to anything meaningful? I'm clearly in favor of the latter interpretation, but that's just my opinion, ultimately. I do think that if the narration has a concrete, unambiguous meaning, it is the only thing in Last Year at Marienbad that does - that and the idea of memory. It's definitely about memory. This the only thing about the film that everybody agrees on. Perhaps it is structured as a series of memories intruding their way into present, such that absolutely no distinction is made between "what I am thinking now", "what I was thinking then", and "what I am remembering now about then". Or perhaps it's just that the film completely abandons continuity in favor of a fragmentary editing structure that sets shots next to each other without generating a meaning between them, even the ones that are theoretically obeying the rules of Hollywood continuity editing. It is, at least, a cutting rhythm that makes every moment feel very real and present, but also very disconnected from all of the other moments, such that we're never able to build up a feeling of a cohesive identity - for the film or its narrator. And that's really what the whole memory thing is about, anyway: if I cannot reliable call up what happened in my past, do I have an identity in the present? It's extremely post-war in that way, indulging that sense of a ruptured history that has been emptied of meaning that shows up so much in the high art produced in Europe in the years after 1945. Which is also part of the "1960s art film" moment: watching people play-acting the roles of "cultured person of means living as a hollow shell in the hollow shell of Old Europe".
That's one of the other very concrete, definite things about Last Year at Marienbad: by God, it takes place in a location. Several locations, actually, mostly palaces in the vicinity of Munich, as well as some studio sets in Paris. The narration, especially early on, latches onto the physicality of the locations in the absence of anything else to latch onto: we hear Albertazzi describe the look and arrangement and texture of things in extremely labored detail, as though the only thing he is absolutely certain that he has experienced is the curve of a certain handrail or the color of a certain wall. The film has been shot by Sacha Vierny in an extraordinarily beautiful greyscale, some of the most rich-looking low-contrast black and white cinematography I can name, where every location seems to comprised out of a thousand barely discernible differences in luminance. It's terribly gorgeous, and sleek, and very surface level: it feels like even the real-world locations are just facades, a feeling goaded on by the way Resnais and crew sneak some little bits and pieces of surrealism into the set design (most famously, the film uses painted shadows to quietly give us a sense of "wrongness" when not everything casts a shadow on what appears to be a bright, sunny day - it was actually overcast). And Resnais also nudges us in that direction with the blocking, where he often has his cast stop moving all of a sudden, turning the human figures in the film into mannequins right in front of our eyes, and violently throwing us out of the reality of these seemingly very tangible, very reliably physical spaces that are the only thing that seems trustworthy in this very slippery, unstable world.
The effect of all this is, perhaps surprisingly and I'm pretty sure intentionally, something awfully close to straight-up horror: and why not? Having no sense of identity as you maneuver around a world that seems to have no history and may not even be real would be horrifying. The film gives us an even harder nudge in that direction by the score, composed by Francis Seyrig. He's Delphine Seyrig's brother, and I don't know who was associated with the film first, but I do know that, despite how vastly more important her career as a whole would be, he's the one who matters more here. He might even matter more than Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, though probably not more than Vierny. But other than the slow, gliding camera movements, I do think that the single element of Last Year at Marienbad that sticks with me the most is Seyrig's organ-dominated score, thudding its way slowly and ominously across all of those handsomely dead interiors. Not that I think anybody involved with Marienbad would have made this exact comparison, but it's basically the music of a cheap haunted house, plodding ghostly tones moaning in lugubrious morbidity, making the beautiful spaces seem dolorous and mournful. It completely overwhelms the movie, and I think that's exactly as intended: stripped of its narrative structure, stripped of its editing structure, Last Year at Marienbad has become a sort of anti-cinema, or cinema stripped bare of the things that allow it to give meaning, and so it needs to rely on another art form to carry its emotions. And that is something the music certainly does, and while the emotions are awfully heavy and discomfiting as a result, they are remarkable coherent - indeed, for something so pointedly shapless, it's extraordinary how nothing in Marienbad feels out of place, how well it seems to extract a form of artistic meaning from its meaninglessness.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
Last Year at Marienbad is to the midcentury European art film as Singin in the Rain is to the Hollywood studio film or October is to pre-Stalinist Soviet film: it is the apotheosis of an entire conceptual approach to filmmaking. We can point to other films that represented a more radical break with what had gone before; we can probably point to films that are more pleasant to watch; we cannot, I don't think, point to films that are more art film. Narrative ambiguity, psychological realism, a grounding in state-of-the-art Continental philosophy and postmodern theory, focus on the material qualities of cinema, it's all there in abundance.
It's the kind of film that cannot be described in even the loosest way without immediately diving into some of the most utterly florid, pretentious terminology. This is, in part, because it is inscrutable. It did not invent being inscrutable, of course, but it maybe the the film its of era where inscrutability is most obviously "the point". It does for narrative ambiguity what Le Million did for sound, The Wizard of Oz did for Technicolor, or what Ben-Hur did for widescreen: it takes a fairly new development in cinema and push it to the farthest extreme it can be taken, making that innovation the focal point of its storytelling and spectacle. One could easily get lost in the question of "what happens" in Last Year at Marienbad - or, to be more precise, what happened, given that the film's subject matter is famously the instability of memory - but that is very much a trap, I think. We should maybe take nothing about Marienbad at face value, including the things its creators said outside of the film, but I would appeal to the authority of Alain Robbe-Grillet, most important as a novelist, where he spearheaded the Nouveau roman literary movement in the late '50s and '60s, but who also wrote the screenplay for this film. And wrote the screenplay as a film, including detailed suggestions about the visuals and camerawork that were largely adopted by the actual director, Alain Resnais, who was stranger neither to working with major, artistically revolutionary novelists, nor with films that deal with highly ambiguous psychological states and unconventional narrative (his only prior feature was 1959's Hiroshima mon amour, written by Marguerite Duras). The same year as the film's release, Robbe-Grillet published his screenplay as a "cine-novel", writing an introduction where he said, among other things:
"Two attitudes are then possible: either the spectator will try to reconstitute some 'Cartesian' scheme – the most linear, the most rational he can devise – and this spectator will certainly find the film difficult if not incomprehensible; or else the spectator will let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him, by the actors’ voices, by the soundtrack, by the music, by the rhythm of the cutting, by the passion of the characters. And to this spectator, the film will seem the easiest he has ever seen: a film addressed exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling."
-Translation by Richard Howard, 1962
In other words, we have been given permission by one-half of the film's authorial voice (both Robbe-Grillet and Resnais were consistent, in the years that followed, in declaring this a perfectly-matched collaboration between them) to not bother trying to "solve" Last Year at Marienbad, and I am very sorry if it seems like taking the easy way out, but I think I should like to take him up on that offer. It truly does feel to me like the film is opaque not as a way of being obnoxious, or of creating a puzzle to solve, but because opacity is itself the film's subject matter. Not even just the opacity of the story, where the central conflict is whether one character's recollections of past events is correct or not; if not, is it because he's mistaken, hallucinating, or lying; if yes, then why is the person he's trying to convince so confident that he's wrong. Talking about the film's narrative is easier, as so many things are, if we take our cues from 1920s Russian literary theory, and the paired concepts of fabula and syuzhet: at the risk of making a very, very complex framework of ideas much too simple, fabula is essentially the "content" of a story, what happened but also what it means and how it feels; syuzhet is is the way the story is structured and presented. Sometimes this gets rendered as "story" versus "plot", though fabula and syuzhet are somewhat looser and more expansive than those words. It can be (and has been) said that syuzhet follows fabula, that the elements of the story precede the decision about how to organize them; it can be (and has been) said that fabula is generated from syuzhet, that the organization is what gives meaning and definition to the material that we interpret as "the story".
Last Year at Marienbad is in some ways an experiment (indeed, if we say there is a hard-and-fast line separating "experimental" film from "narrative" film - as I'm not inclined to do - I truly do not know what side of that line Marienbad would better fit on) in exploring what happens when syuzhet is not used to organize fabula: when, maybe, there is no fabula to organize at all. I say "in some ways", because I don't suppose that Robbe-Grillet and Resnais were thinking in those terms. I mean, certainly not in the terms "fabula" and "syuzhet", which I don't believe were at all in use in the West at that point. Not in terms of "let's run an experiment". I rather think that they were trying to make a film in which the presentation of the story was the story, that "what happened last year in Marienbad" is immaterial, and that what actually matter is the way that the unstable, incoherent "present" is patterned by the editing and by the compositions, by the way that (apparent?) flashbacks are interwoven with it, by the sensations driven by pure aesthetics, and how those manifest as emotional states that we can connect to the seeming events of the plot. It is not, emphatically not, a "style over substance" movie, since the style is clearly expressive in ways that bring us closer to the characters. It's more that it's about style doing the work of substance, in substance's absence. To use a different term in a register about as far from Soviet literary theory as I think it is possible to go: it's basically a "vibes" movie.
The questions then become, what are those vibes? How are they built? How do they make us feel? And I'm not really able to answer those questions, because that's what watching Last Year at Marienbad is, experiencing those questions and the ideas they lead to in real time. Notwithstanding Robbe-Grillet's reference to "the passion of the characters", this is an extraordinarily chilly film that resides almost solely at the level of intellectual experience, and I say that even as I find it to be exhilarating thing to watch and feel like my brain needs to be cooled down at some length when the film's 94 minutes have run their course (this review is, for the record, based on the third time I watched the film, the second time I loved it - the first time I was much too young and much too unready for this kind of free-floating anti-narrative formal play, and hated the shit out of it. That is to say, you shouldn't see Last Year at Marienbad because you're "meant to". Even as a huge fan of this and Resnais in general, this isn't a film to watch if you're not in perfectly the right mood to deal with its aggressively frustrating oblique qualities). It's emotionally transporting in the way that beautiful things are, and the emotions it stirs up are heavy and terrifying, but it's also something where you more think "I am having a feeling" than you have the feeling.
That being said, there are some basic observations it's possible to make. Such as the concrete story elements: in a very fancy estate in Europe that is possibly functioning now as a spa and hotel, a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) is convinced that a woman (Delphine Seyrig) is the person he had an affair with at a similar spa and hotel last year - probably not even at Marienbad, he at first seems confident it was Frederiksbad. She denies it, though he's convinced this is because she doesn't want to incur the wrath of a gaunt-faced second man (Sacha Pitoëff) who looks like a mummified version of Humphrey Bogart and may be the woman's husband. In Robbe-Grillet's cine-novel, these three characters were referred to, respectively, as X, A, and M, and sometimes critics do the same, for convenience's sake. More convenient still to not bother talking about the characters at all, since I think there's an excellent chance that none of them are real, or at least that A and M aren't. Someone is doing all of the whispery, spidery narration that keeps rising and falling volume on the soundtrack, and whether that person is X or not, he speaks with X's voice. The narration, I think, is one of the film's main devices for both feigning that it can be interpreted and then refusing to let us do so: we keep getting pieces of sentences, often full thoughts even, but he's also often mumbling down so low in the mix that you can only pick out occasional consonant sounds.
So is the narration the key to what's going on, or just a surface-level element of style, a way of pressing a kind of morbid feeling on the film (when we can clearly make it out, he's generally saying haunted, desperate things) that isn't really connected to anything meaningful? I'm clearly in favor of the latter interpretation, but that's just my opinion, ultimately. I do think that if the narration has a concrete, unambiguous meaning, it is the only thing in Last Year at Marienbad that does - that and the idea of memory. It's definitely about memory. This the only thing about the film that everybody agrees on. Perhaps it is structured as a series of memories intruding their way into present, such that absolutely no distinction is made between "what I am thinking now", "what I was thinking then", and "what I am remembering now about then". Or perhaps it's just that the film completely abandons continuity in favor of a fragmentary editing structure that sets shots next to each other without generating a meaning between them, even the ones that are theoretically obeying the rules of Hollywood continuity editing. It is, at least, a cutting rhythm that makes every moment feel very real and present, but also very disconnected from all of the other moments, such that we're never able to build up a feeling of a cohesive identity - for the film or its narrator. And that's really what the whole memory thing is about, anyway: if I cannot reliable call up what happened in my past, do I have an identity in the present? It's extremely post-war in that way, indulging that sense of a ruptured history that has been emptied of meaning that shows up so much in the high art produced in Europe in the years after 1945. Which is also part of the "1960s art film" moment: watching people play-acting the roles of "cultured person of means living as a hollow shell in the hollow shell of Old Europe".
That's one of the other very concrete, definite things about Last Year at Marienbad: by God, it takes place in a location. Several locations, actually, mostly palaces in the vicinity of Munich, as well as some studio sets in Paris. The narration, especially early on, latches onto the physicality of the locations in the absence of anything else to latch onto: we hear Albertazzi describe the look and arrangement and texture of things in extremely labored detail, as though the only thing he is absolutely certain that he has experienced is the curve of a certain handrail or the color of a certain wall. The film has been shot by Sacha Vierny in an extraordinarily beautiful greyscale, some of the most rich-looking low-contrast black and white cinematography I can name, where every location seems to comprised out of a thousand barely discernible differences in luminance. It's terribly gorgeous, and sleek, and very surface level: it feels like even the real-world locations are just facades, a feeling goaded on by the way Resnais and crew sneak some little bits and pieces of surrealism into the set design (most famously, the film uses painted shadows to quietly give us a sense of "wrongness" when not everything casts a shadow on what appears to be a bright, sunny day - it was actually overcast). And Resnais also nudges us in that direction with the blocking, where he often has his cast stop moving all of a sudden, turning the human figures in the film into mannequins right in front of our eyes, and violently throwing us out of the reality of these seemingly very tangible, very reliably physical spaces that are the only thing that seems trustworthy in this very slippery, unstable world.
The effect of all this is, perhaps surprisingly and I'm pretty sure intentionally, something awfully close to straight-up horror: and why not? Having no sense of identity as you maneuver around a world that seems to have no history and may not even be real would be horrifying. The film gives us an even harder nudge in that direction by the score, composed by Francis Seyrig. He's Delphine Seyrig's brother, and I don't know who was associated with the film first, but I do know that, despite how vastly more important her career as a whole would be, he's the one who matters more here. He might even matter more than Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, though probably not more than Vierny. But other than the slow, gliding camera movements, I do think that the single element of Last Year at Marienbad that sticks with me the most is Seyrig's organ-dominated score, thudding its way slowly and ominously across all of those handsomely dead interiors. Not that I think anybody involved with Marienbad would have made this exact comparison, but it's basically the music of a cheap haunted house, plodding ghostly tones moaning in lugubrious morbidity, making the beautiful spaces seem dolorous and mournful. It completely overwhelms the movie, and I think that's exactly as intended: stripped of its narrative structure, stripped of its editing structure, Last Year at Marienbad has become a sort of anti-cinema, or cinema stripped bare of the things that allow it to give meaning, and so it needs to rely on another art form to carry its emotions. And that is something the music certainly does, and while the emotions are awfully heavy and discomfiting as a result, they are remarkable coherent - indeed, for something so pointedly shapless, it's extraordinary how nothing in Marienbad feels out of place, how well it seems to extract a form of artistic meaning from its meaninglessness.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
