I’ve sat around all evening and into the night trying to come up with an intelligent and coherent reflection for LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, but all I’ve ended up doing is sitting at a blank computer screen with similar anguish to Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman in ADAPTATION. My mind has raced between the ideas of the visual motifs. The mirrors. The long corridors. The late Baroque architecture. The frozen people. The deep shadows. And how all of these images I can recall represent something. I also remember the dialogue in which guests at this fancy château ask whether an event took place in 1928 or ‘29, if they remember meeting each other at a previous engagement, if they’ve seen something (the character actually only heard about it) and vaguely comment on making some sort of connections that aren’t actually there. But my mind is ultimately lead to the meat of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, which is the back and forth between our male and female characters about meeting each other the year prior at the very same venue. The man attempts to prove to the woman they met and had an affair together, but she seems to refuse to accept it. Or even remember it. With all of that in my head, I’ve attempted to make connections between all of these things and how I can possibly address all of them in one well thought out, coherent piece. Is it about the nature of the human mind and its ability to recall past events and feelings? Is it about love and how sometimes it is worth taking a risk for? Or should I look past all of that and look deeper and see it as an allegory about the very art and craft of filmmaking? LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD appears to be about all of these things, yet still manages to be about none of them. It’s an enigma. It’s free association and stream of consciousness put to film. In the end, we the viewer take away what we want from this romantic yet haunting fever dream of a movie. At one point I feel like I’ve made all the connections, put all the pieces of the puzzle together, only to find myself back where I started, scratching my head and wondering how in the world I am going to write this review. I guess, all I can really write is, “Wow. What striking black and white cinematography.”