Last Year at Marienbad

I sat on the Tube for almost an hour (two, both ways), listened to some angry old men bitterly discuss RAF WWII squadrons, and had to endure two different sets of couples making out (not just a little, tongue and all). And I got soaked in the rain. For what? To see Alain Resnais' 1961 Last Year at Marienbad. After all of that (plenty of time to think about it), I still have little idea what the movie was actually about.

Ostensibly, the plot concerns a man X who finds a woman A at an elaborate resort hotel and tries to convince her that one year ago they were lovers; he has returned to rendez-vous with her as planned. She , however, does not (or does) believe him (and she has a scary vampire-y husband/lover who must be accounted for). This is not what the movie is about.

Resnais apparently once said that the film had no meaning--it's an interesting statement because it makes the film nothing more than an exercise in formalism and modernist aesthetics. It's a carefully constructed "clever" puzzle piece, like something you may have found in the Surrealist circles of the first half of the twentieth century, no more. If you look at it from this point of view, it does make an interesting study--the camera angles are beautiful and smooth, the B&W lush, the editing snappy and brilliant. It makes you question reality in just the right way; it is l'art pour l'art. And if this is the case, I guess that's alright. I'm more of a narrative girl myself, but hey, a little Chris Marker or, in this case, M. Resnais is a welcome diversion once in a while.

Not surprisingly, it appears the movie spawned a bit of a cottage industry of theorists. Apparently the original idea for the movie comes from a novel by a colleague of Borges; it is the low-brow Fantastic at its best, or at least at its most Spanish. Resnais fails to credit this source material at all (I suppose it would have, you know, made the movie reference something outside of itself--and we couldn't have that, could we), but its suggestion of the world as a virtual reality, a world made of holograms essentially, makes the movie slightly more compelling for me and seems to place it as some sort of weird precursor to the glut of alternate reality sci-fi fests that have come along in recent years. But, uh, this is all theorizing, and involved outside resources, and there's not a chance in hell that you would have inferred an obscure mid-century sci-fi novel, en espanol, from the film's text.

I love the film visually, and assuredly it makes an interesting discussion piece, but it lacks any compelling characters (or characters at all, frankly--they're largely hollow stand-ins for reality (but this is, of course, the point)) and in all honesty, any compelling narrative (or lack thereof). Structurally, formally it is a feat to be admired. Oh--and organ music? Super creepy.