Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
(L'année dernière à Marienbad)
Country: FR
Technical: bw/scope 94m
Director: Alain Resnais
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff
Synopsis:
At an exclusive hotel housed in a baroque chateau, a bored wife is accosted by a man who claims to have been her lover the year before...
Review:
A puzzle piece for intellectuals that can be read on various levels: a meditation on the elusive nature of memory; a recurring dream that takes on an increasingly nightmarish quality; the story of a psychiatrist and his patient in which the former attempts to reconstruct a buried trauma from the past; or simply a summation of all the arts in one piece of aesthetic self-indulgence. Approached on these terms it will provide hours of playful and ravishingly beautiful viewing pleasure; taken on any one of them it can seem irritatingly insubstantial. Anyway, it provided a cinematic jumping-off point for novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who continued dabbling in fragmented storylines (with his own slant of eroticism) for a decade or so. For Resnais it permitted a further elaboration of themes outlined in his Hiroshima Mon Amour, though a less satisfying one.
(L'année dernière à Marienbad)
Country: FR
Technical: bw/scope 94m
Director: Alain Resnais
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff
Synopsis:
At an exclusive hotel housed in a baroque chateau, a bored wife is accosted by a man who claims to have been her lover the year before...
Review:
A puzzle piece for intellectuals that can be read on various levels: a meditation on the elusive nature of memory; a recurring dream that takes on an increasingly nightmarish quality; the story of a psychiatrist and his patient in which the former attempts to reconstruct a buried trauma from the past; or simply a summation of all the arts in one piece of aesthetic self-indulgence. Approached on these terms it will provide hours of playful and ravishingly beautiful viewing pleasure; taken on any one of them it can seem irritatingly insubstantial. Anyway, it provided a cinematic jumping-off point for novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who continued dabbling in fragmented storylines (with his own slant of eroticism) for a decade or so. For Resnais it permitted a further elaboration of themes outlined in his Hiroshima Mon Amour, though a less satisfying one.
(L'année dernière à Marienbad)
Country: FR
Technical: bw/scope 94m
Director: Alain Resnais
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff
Synopsis:
At an exclusive hotel housed in a baroque chateau, a bored wife is accosted by a man who claims to have been her lover the year before...
Review:
A puzzle piece for intellectuals that can be read on various levels: a meditation on the elusive nature of memory; a recurring dream that takes on an increasingly nightmarish quality; the story of a psychiatrist and his patient in which the former attempts to reconstruct a buried trauma from the past; or simply a summation of all the arts in one piece of aesthetic self-indulgence. Approached on these terms it will provide hours of playful and ravishingly beautiful viewing pleasure; taken on any one of them it can seem irritatingly insubstantial. Anyway, it provided a cinematic jumping-off point for novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who continued dabbling in fragmented storylines (with his own slant of eroticism) for a decade or so. For Resnais it permitted a further elaboration of themes outlined in his Hiroshima Mon Amour, though a less satisfying one.