L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)

L’Année dernière à Marienbad is a French romantic film drama first released in 1961, directed by Alain Resnais.  The film is based on a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares and stars Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff and Françoise Bertin.  It has also been released under the title: Last Year at Marienbad.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


The location is a sprawling baroque hotel set in beautiful sculptured gardens.  At a large social gathering, a stranger, X, accosts a young woman, A, and tries to convince her that they have met before, one year ago, perhaps at Marienbad.  X reminds A of her promise to leave her husband, M, and elope with him.  But A has no recollection of the meeting taking place...

Fifty years after it was made, L’Année dernière à Marienbad remains one of cinema’s greatest enigmas, a film which is so seductively alluring and yet so utterly mystifying.  Film historians and reviewers have argued endlessly over what the film means without arriving at any definitive conclusion.  This is one of those unique works of art where the observer can read into it anything he or she wishes.  There are as many different interpretations of this film as there are minds that are able to interpret it.   It is an open-ended mystery, a puzzle to which each spectator holds his own key, but his solution will be uniquely his own.  

This remarkable piece of cinema art was the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between two emerging creative talents of the late 1950s, the modernist filmmaker Alain Resnais and a rising star of the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet.  Resnais had made only one full-length film prior to this, the critically acclaimed Hiroshima mon amour (1959), but had previously made several short films, the best-known being a documentary on the Nazi concentration camps, Nuit et brouillard (1955).  Robbe-Grillet had started out as an agronomist but turned to writing in the 1950s, publishing novels that were characterised by their stylised geometric form. By bringing Resnais and Robbe-Grillet together, independent film producers Pierre Courau and Raymond Froment sought to achieve a fusion between two innovative art forms, the new novel and the new cinema.  What they ended up with must have defied even their expectations, a film that would be regarded as one of the most important works of the French New Wave.

L’Année dernière à Marienbad is a film that deliberately sets out to break all of the rules of film narrative.  The plot can be summarised in two sentences and yet this hardly explains the film at all.  Its subjective standpoint is unreliable and unstable, so we end up not knowing what to believe, or indeed whether we should believe anything we see or hear.  The characters are not convincing human beings but poor approximations to human beings, like crudely finished automata engaged in some bizarre mechanical ritual.  Even the film’s representation of time and space feels disorientatingly unreal, not at all how we experience these parameters in our world.  

There is an unsettling dreamlike quality to this film.  What it portrays is surely not reality, but a fractured pseudo-reality.  We see the same events being repeated over and over again, but in subtly different ways.  The flow of time is disjointed, irregular, with past, present and future experiences somehow knotted together in a way that makes it impossible for us to have any notion of causality.  This is not how a human being would depict our world, but it might be how a godlike being sitting outside our four-dimensional reality sees us.  Could this be what Brief Encounter would look like if seen on an extraterrestrial’s super-HD television set?

L’Année dernière à Marienbad is surely a cinematic UFO, something that is inherently beyond our understanding.  And yet, for all its bizarre alien quality, it draws us to it, compels us to make sense of it, even though it knows it will defeat us, like the mysterious character M, who never fails to lose his irritating game with the matchsticks.

Perhaps the first clue to unravelling this mystery lies in the haunting tracking shots which take us through the deserted hotel at the start of the film.  What do these suggest - a dream, an excursion into the endless labyrinthine passages of the human mind?   Just when we begin to suppose that we will be forever trapped in this cold lifeless universe, we are shown the human inhabitants of this world.  But they are not people as we would recognise them.  They are a collection of dummies, sitting motionless, expressionless as they watch a play.  Once the play is concluded, these soulless automata become animated.  They try, but fail, to convince us that they are human beings.  One of these strange quasi-humans, M, challenges his fellows to a game which he invariably wins.  Is M meant to represent death, la mort, by chance?

We then see another man, X, whom we instinctively identify as the narrator.  It was his hypnotic words which first drew us into the labyrinth, into this timeless other reality.  Unlike the people around him, he has a personality, free will - he is the only character who is alive.  Perhaps this is his world, a construct of his imagination, his memories.  At the heart of this maze of confused imagery lies an obsession, X’s determination to win one particular woman, A.  Again and again, he tries to persuade her that they were once lovers, that she once promised to be his forever.  A presumably represents love, l’amour, death’s reluctant spouse...

As X persists, A appears to regain some long forgotten memory and becomes less automaton-like, more human.  Will X succeed and separate A from M, or will he be condemned to repeat the whole exercise again, and again, trapped in a cycle of pointless repetition for all eternity?   

Could this be an opaque allegory of life, one that depicts the struggle of the anonymous individual (X) to find love (A) and evade the clutches of death (M) for as long as possible?  Or is it an attempt to represent the creative process, showing how, in the shadow world of the author’s imagination, characters are gradually brought to life and a story slowly begins to take shape?  Others have posited the more prosaic but equally plausible view that it is really just a parody of the Hollywood melodrama.  The permutations are endless.

Not surprisingly, the distributors of L’Année dernière à Marienbad were initially horrified when they first saw it.  After they refused to release it, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet gave private screenings to influential artists in the hope that this would allow the film to gain a certain notoriety.  Ironically, André Breton, the surrealist writer and poet to whom the film was dedicated, was singularly unimpressed by it. 

It was not until after the film won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1961 that the distributors felt confident to release it.  Generally, the criticism was very positive, although the film aroused considerable controversy in the French press and was dismissed by some as pretentious nonsense.  Today, L’Année dernière à Marienbad is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of modernist cinema, a film that has lost none of its power to beguile and bewilder, a true one-off.

© James Travers 2010

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