The Surrealistic SpaceTime

Last Year at Marienbad (henceforth, LYAM) begins by describing a beautiful ornate chateau. The camera rolls through the long corridors, huge walls, decorated ceilings, murals, paintings & other artifacts and a low voice slowly starts talking. The voice in the tracking shot repeats the same words and unwittingly we already feel eerie even though it is only a few minutes. The elegant invitees in the chateau are watching a theatre. We observe a person ("X") approaches a beautiful woman ("A") and asks her -"did not we meet at Marienbad last year"? The woman keeps her silence but X continues elaborating a familiar experience he had with her in a similar chateau last year, where she was finally ready to leave her husband ("M"') and run away with him. The woman replies she did not even know X but X persists with a passionate minute detailing of what had happened in the last year. X repeats his memory repeatedly over and over again, which changes minutely between each description, all against the milieu of the hallways, rooms, and garden in the chateau.

As the film progresses the characters and the narration of the film start becoming more uncertain. Resnais masterfully handled a mixture model where present, past, and possible fantasy worlds are coagulated together. The viewers sense a confused state with the sequence of events in the chateau, wondering whether X & A had really met in Marienbad. The events we finally observe are left to our comprehension. The events might be real (that is X is meeting with A), that this chateau is really in Marienbad, that X and Y had met last year, or else X is fantasizing everything.

Resnais created a perfectly mesmerizing mood and tonal balance to supplement the narration. The hypnotic tableau of figures and the perfect geometrical arrangement of the garden in the chateau has a deep but implicit notions of mathematics. Resnais's motif becomes clearer when we notice the guests are passing time by playing "Niim" (a logic game; can be played with cards). Often by using a surrealistic dream-imagery or freezing all unrequited physical objects in various shots or flashing a possible fantasy/memory shot repeatedly (with different time durations) Resnais confirms his grasp in connecting unclear dots in a beautiful but demanding logical progression. At the end the viewers will finally rethink “was there anything to identify with” or” does the time standing still for the last one&half hour?


Film - Année dernière à Marienbad, L' (Last Year at Marienbad)
Release Date - 1961
Directed By - Alain Resnais