Pauline Kael called it the snow job in the ice palace, and the film hasn't got much warmer in the 50 years since its appearance, even if the term snow job seems to belong to yesterday's slang. But Last Year in Marienbad, now showing as part of an Alain Resnais retrospective at the BFI, 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.
Last Year in MarienbadProduction year: 1961Countries: France, Italy Runtime: 94 minsDirectors: Alain ResnaisCast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio AlbertazziMore on this filmSome aspects of the film have aged severely. The heavy music-track, for example, especially the omnipresent organ tootling, was meant perhaps to suggest a mixture of horror movie and automated toyshop, but now just provides noisy irritation. Films have become a lot quieter since then – at least in the music department. And above all the acting seems weirdly dated, with its deliberately sought-out stiffness and posing. We see the same effect in Antonioni and Bergman, and it had good intentions behind it. It was meant to signal a departure from naturalism, and it must have seemed that the only way of getting actors not to look too much like real people was to get them to look like actors not quite up to scratch, producing the tinny laughs and lame gestures of amateurs. Now the performance just looks arch, and we know that stylisation in film requires more extreme measures – a real marionette-effect, for instance. It's notable that in this film Resnais succeeds best with his anti-naturalist note when the actors are either quite still – so still you don't know whether they are in a moving picture or a photograph – or dancing, rocking slowly, dully, to the sounds of an unearthly waltz.
But for the rest, the film is entirely compelling, and braves time because of its worry about time. Everything is narrated in the past tense, even when we seem to have arrived at the present. The present too, the implication is, will become a story any minute now, and like all stories, subject to debate and denial. The film feels like a thriller where we are not waiting to find out what happens but what a character will say has happened, and whether anyone will believe him or her. And what's at stake in this saying and this belief.
Space too is a worry. The very title – the writer Alain Robbe-Grillet's script was called Last Year – offers a certainty the work itself doesn't have. A man, played by Giorgio Albertazzi, whose fluent, Italian-accented voice tells most of the story in the soundtrack, is trying to persuade a woman, Delphine Seyrig, that they met in the same place last year, got caught up in a mutual fascination and arranged to meet now, a year later. But met where? Even the man can't remember, insistent though he is on the past encounter. It was in a fancy hotel in a German spa, to be sure. Friedrichstadt, perhaps? Karlstadt? Last year in Marienbad is just one of the possibilities.
And where are they now? The same place or another? Does it matter that he may be making it all up? That it may be perfectly true, but not a story she wants to acknowledge? A mixture of the two? It can't matter in the sense that we need to arrive at a solution. The film is not a riddle. But of course there is considerable energy and anxiety in all of the options, and we can scarcely fail to care about the possibilities. In its early days, as I remember, the film generated a sort of interpretative panic: what can this story mean, and what can I do with it until I know what it means? Now it creates, to speak for myself as of yesterday at least, an edgy sort of bewilderment: who are these people and what is the matter with them?
Similar questions arise with the photograph the man offers as proof of their meeting. The woman doesn't deny it's a photograph of her, but says it could have been taken anywhere, and by anyone. But then is the photograph even real? It may be part of the story the man imagines himself as telling the woman, as distinct from the story he tells her: the pictures he sees (and we see) of what he might say. As the film goes on the photograph itself seems more and more like fantasy than proof. The woman sits in a chair, looking at it enfolded in a book. She opens a drawer in her hotel bedroom and finds it there. She opens the same drawer and finds it full of copies of the photograph, 15 or 20 of them. This shot plainly shows someone's delirious imagination, perhaps the man's picturing of an invasion of her world, perhaps the woman's image of what the invasion feels like to her.
And with such an image we arrive at the film's striking originality, or rather the air of originality it derives from its fidelity to a fact about cinema and a mostly neglected chance of cinema. The fact is too obvious for us to think about it much. We cannot not see what is on the screen unless we close our eyes, so that every pictorial proposition is in one sense undeniable – the same goes for aural propositions. Last Year in Marienbad shows us, without discrimination, what is assumed to be there now, whenever now is, what was there then (actually at several past moments), and what is imagined (or narrated) by someone to be there or have been there.
The process is clearest when the man narrates his various arrivals in the woman's room. In one version she is aghast, afraid of his violence. In another she welcomes him with dizzy joy, arms open. In yet another she is dead, presumably shot by the man who is presumably her husband. I don't know whether it says something about the film or about me that I found the picture of her fear by far the most convincing. But the real point, no doubt, is not which version is true – the likeliest case is that he has never been in her room at all – but whether any of them could become true, and whether there are other truths.
The chance of cinema is the divorce of sound from image, praised by Eisenstein as a fabulous possibility, brilliantly played with in Singin' in the Rain but largely ignored by an industry and a public that wanted synchronised talk and appropriate musical cues. The most vivid instance of the divorce in Last Year in Marienbad – a truly haunting one that's hard to shift once it's got into your mind – has the characters attending a concert at the spa hotel. Two violinists visibly, energetically hack away at their instruments, but we hear only the familiar organ music of the soundtrack, as if the film were determined to substitute its own noise for all actual sounds of the world it is depicting.
And the most beautiful, integrated uses of the divorce occur when the man describes an image from the past, the woman in a particular place and a particular posture, while the screen shows us the woman in a different posture and place, almost aggressively not doing what the voice-over says she is doing. But then, when the voice is talking about something else, we will see the image we have heard described, and surely, most of us, be tempted to believe the description is correct, even if the image has gone astray. This is precisely because, as I have suggested, we can't not believe our eyes, and in this case we match what they see to what we have heard. It's only a little later that the more sceptical or speculative among us will wonder whether this belated arrival of the image doesn't represent a transfer of fantasy, or what one commentator has called the contamination of the woman's imaginary world. Either way the film is telling us something about memory and visualisation, as well as about film.
What is consistent among all the doubts and slices of ageing of Last Year in Marienbad is the woman's alarmed attention to the man's story – she doesn't have to listen, and she scarcely does anything else – and the man's passionate insistence that last year, responding to his pleas and attention, she was alive. As she is not otherwise, the suggestion goes, and as no one else is in this frozen world. The man is quite sure that it is better to be alive than to be dead, and this is what gives the film its moments of romantic intensity. The woman is not so sure, and she knows, as perhaps he does not, that one could get killed for trying to live. When they leave the hotel together at the end of the film, they are not arm in arm, as critics have said, but quite separate, walking like zombies, their backs to us. They can only get away, it seems, in order to come back and start again, trying to remember, trying to forget.
Last Year in Marienbad is at BFI Southbank until 4 August.
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