Movie Review – Last Year at Marienbad

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Directed by Alain Resnais

Spoilers if you have not watched Twin Peaks: The Return. Like in the very next paragraph. You have been warned.

In the closing moments of David Lynch & Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Special Agent Dale Cooper stands with Laura Palmer outside her home in the titular town. They’ve just discovered the woman living there is not Sarah Palmer and has no clue who Laura is. Cooper does not know what to do next but is an investigator. He stands, staring into the distance, trying to grasp onto anything. He utters the final line of the show: “What year is it?” Laura screams. Darkness falls. Credits roll over the image of Cooper sitting in the red room, Laura whispering something in his ear. We are unmoored from time; past/present/future mean nothing. What do we have if we don’t have time to cling to?

In a lavish hotel where the rich have come to cavort and socialize, a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) approaches a woman (Delphine Seyrig). Haven’t they met before? Last year? At another resort? Did we have sex? Didn’t you say you needed to wait a year before you could decide if things should progress? She insists he must have the wrong person. He’s so sure. He relates the details of last year’s encounter to see if it jogs her memory. But how could she forget something like that? The man provides details, and she counters with her own memories. A third man (Sacha Pitoëff) enters the picture. The woman’s partner? It’s never made sure. We see scenes play out in repeat with details changed. The story unfolds in a non-linear fashion. The ending leaves us just as uncertain as the start.

I can see why some audiences would hate this movie. It is designed to frustrate the audience. But I clearly saw the strings between the work of a director like David Lynch and what was happening in Last Year at Marienbad. What we have is a film uninterested in plot beats or even in character development. This is a picture whose primary concern is how narratives are constructed and how we find connections in the chaos around us. We feel it more as infants and become dull as we age. It’s the chaotic frenzy of information and dissonance in our own minds. I know being autistic has me in my head a lot, and I feel the jagged edges of my nervous system quite often. Social interactions are puzzles to be solved. My brain sometimes puts things together differently than they should be, or at least how others think they should be.

Alain Resnais was fascinated with how our minds operate as a jumble of connections and thoughts. We see it in how he chooses to cut between the Nazi death camps in 1955 with file footage of their occupants a decade or more earlier. Through film, these points in time come to exist simultaneously. An empty, weed-overgrown warehouse was also a site of mass slaughter. Resnais continued with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, relating how profound trauma shatters time, capturing us like a swampy bog. Eventually, we lose sight of our own identities. While Last Year at Marienbad is not overtly political, it navigates those same experimental waters and explores the framework of perception and relation.

Repetition is important. Specific phrases are said repeatedly, like objects held in the hand, turned over, and examined by a pathologist. Coming out of a large social event, I often replay moments where I might have been too awkward or try to retroactively determine if the person I spoke to actually enjoyed talking to me. You do this sort of introspection long enough and end up in the Twilight Zone of Marienbad. It’s no longer about where you were or what you were doing but about tones & rhythms. 

Screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet delivered a script so exact that it even included soundtrack cues. Resnais would make suggestions, trying to ground the film in some present-day reality by referencing the world outside; Robbe-Grillet said no. Resnais stated there were moments he felt like a robot while directing. The director did wrest back some control, but it didn’t seem to be an intense anger with each other, just different views of the material. Like the characters, they saw Marienbad and what happens in oppositional ways. 

The attraction between the two characters is never really physical. The man acts as if he only wants to win her approval. He can be horribly cruel at times but then remarkably tender. The other man feels like he should be the villain, but by the end, we can’t help but feel sympathy for him. The woman rarely loses her composure. Resnais is presenting this scenario to create a dialogue with the audience. Pieces of a puzzle, intentionally left incomplete, are laid out. What do we make of them? How do we fill in the gaps?

It’s the same feeling some people have when viewing Lynch’s work. It is intended to be challenging to digest. You are supposed to feel how obtuse it all is. You are meant to discover rhythms & patterns that may not make sense but welcome you into the flow of this piece of art. There’s a great moment in one of the interviews on the Twin Peaks DVDs where I think it was Michael J. Anderson who talks about going to Lynch and trying to understand a particular scene. The director tells him nothing happened before this scene and nothing after it; it has no context. Anderson admits this was a complex concept to get his head around. He had to go with it and feel the scene intuitively rather than intellectually. 

Marienbad is the same but as an entire work. There is nothing but now during the movie. The memories are no different from the present actions. They have been tossed into one space and stirred around. There cannot be an outside world because the dimensions of this work are so self-contained. We hear a midnight chime at the end that mirrors the same sound at the start. It’s a perfect loop. The characters of Marienbad are lost in this story forever. Each time the movie projector starts, or you play on the screen, they are trotted back out and live through the amnesiac haze of their minuscule existence. 

We don’t have a La Jetee without Marienbad. There’s no Memento either. Kubrick’s The Shining wouldn’t happen without this movie. You will notice a familiar bear costume being worn by a party guest here. Like that film’s ending, we discover the protagonist has always been at the Overlook Hotel. It is an acknowledgment of the fiction of the story. There is no Jack Torrance outside the runtime of this movie. No love affair happened a year ago in Marienbad. All that exists is this moment and what we bring to it. Life is a loop, and each of us takes from it what we choose. There is no clear answer to why we are here; we just are. We have the present and our memories in the present. What we make of them, how we form connections with other travelers, is the whole point.