Kritiken

It’s a work whose screenplay is written in a distinctively literary fashion, and yet it feels like cinema in its purest form - never less than ravishing, despite strategically holding the audience at arm’s length.

With Jacques Saulnier's glittering production designs, Francis Seyrig's haunting organ-based score, and above all the glamour of its stars—especially Delphine Seyrig in her Coco Chanel and Bernard Evein gowns—Resnais makes it almost sinfully easy to simply sink into its landscape of desire, recollection, and regret. We may never know what really happens in Last Year at Marienbad, but the confusion remains as beautiful as ever.

Film Forum is screening [Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad] as a double feature, which sounds as obvious as it is revelatory. It bridges the space between canonical status and the astonishing start of a career, offering a window into a moment when cinema was quickly, definitively changed.

Last Year in Marienbad... doesn't seek to trick us, it seeks to portray self-trickery, asks what we might do about it, and why we might be afraid of its alternatives, if it has any.

lain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad is now 50 years old, but it is more brilliant than ever – profoundly mysterious and disturbing, a para-surrealist masterpiece whose nightmarish scenario appears to have been absorbed from Buñuel and Antonioni and transmitted onward to Greenaway.

The frozen romanticism of the film—a story of a man and a woman who meet at a castle-like hotel and may or may not actually have been a couple the previous year—is not the odd element out in the director's filmography. Rather, its psychological intrigue and its glossy, repressed images of ornate, oppressive settings are Resnais's way of pursuing, from different angles, themes similar to those of his other, more overtly political films.

With its stubborn lack of answers and willful defiance of interpretation, Last Year At Marienbad is presented by its creators as a puzzle that doesn’t demand to be solved, but should rather be admired for the splendid curves of its individual pieces.

Beyond Seyrig's fashionable sarcophagus of haute couture Chanel and the movie's self-referential games and rituals, Resnais's film is a stark, elegant horror film about the dread we spend our whole lives trying to put off contemplating until next year.

Leaving aside the frightening wealth of talent contributed by the Alains [Resnais and Robbe-Grillet], Sacha Vierny's photography alone (which even on video tends to elicit gasps of astonishment from the uninitiated) means that every screening of MARIENBAD must be cherished.

I saw this lush experimental movie at least three times the week it opened at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, when I was a college sophomore, and was as smitten as anyone. I still am. But I don't think Marienbad's effect on me would have been as powerful if I hadn't spent most of my childhood soaking up commercial movies, just as Resnais did.

Hopelessly retro, eternally avant-garde, and one of the most influential movies ever made (as well as one of the most reviled), Marienbad is both utterly lucid and provocatively opaque—an elaborate joke on the world's corniest pickup line and a drama of erotic fixation that takes Vertigo to the next level of abstraction.

The film's architecture, its single most important and memorable "character", may represent the narrator's mind and memory, but it is full of "false history", and deceptive visual effects, such as Renaissance statues masquerading as classical subjects, or mirrors that look like windows.