Last Year at Marienbad
(L’Année dernière à Marienbad)
With Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff.
France, 1961, 35mm, black & white, 93 min.
French with English subtitles.
Print source: Rialto Pictures
Resnais’ groundbreaking collaboration with Alain Robbe-Grillet is a hypnotic and haunting exploration of the subjectivity and mutability of memory, itself a dominant theme in Resnais’ work. The film’s dreamlike structure circles back on itself repeatedly, with the repetition of words and images evoking the intimacy and unreliability of memory as a man, known only as X, pursues a woman, A, through an upscale resort, insisting that they had an affair the year before and arranged to meet again, while she claims no memory of him. Resisting any easy interpretations, Resnais encourages uncertainty, dissolving the distinction between reality and fantasy, memory and fiction, while A and X, frozen in an endless loop, explore the infinite variations of their enigmatic interactions.