Alain Resnais had discovered Delphine Seyrig at a party in New York—where she lived at the time—when he asked her to play the enigmatic woman at the heart of his second feature. Last Year at Marienbad made Seyrig a star in the European film world; her black bob and custom Chanel outfits served as sartorial inspirations for a new generation of modern women, while her phantasmal presence on-screen led French critics to anoint her “la divine.” The film, directed by Resnais but heavily dictated by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s script, is a nonlinear black-and-white memory piece that takes place in a baroque palace and its surrounding gardens. Seyrig’s nameless diva wordlessly slinks in and out of the frame, her status as either a projection of the protagonist’s fantasies or a flesh-and-bones human left seductively ambiguous. Though her role is somewhat ornamental, in keeping with the film’s fascination with objects and their (non-) permanence, Seyrig, with her alluringly detached gaze, is the catalyst for the protagonist’s spiral, exerting a supernatural influence over him that would come to define Seyrig’s starpower.

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