Last Year in Marienbad

1961 Director Alain Resnais

A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the film is a riddle of seduction darting between a present and past which may not even exist.

At a social gathering at a château, a man approaches a woman and claims they met the year before at Marienbad. He is convinced that she is waiting here for him. The woman insists they have never met. Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorientating shifts in time and location, the film explores the relationships among the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds seen not only from diffenent perspectives but also different time frames.

Hypnotically dreamlike, Last Year at Marienbad is a surrealist parody of Hollywood melodrama, a high-fashion romance with a dark, alien underbelly. Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the château and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden; although the people cast long dramatic shadows, the trees in the garden do not.