"Last Year at Marienbad"
Director: Alain Resnais
Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Released 1961
With Giorgio Albertazzi, Delphine Seyrig, Sacha Pitoeff, and others
The film seems to present the drama of a love triangle, but the events are
not told in any linear fashion, nor do they constitute a story in the usual
sense. Scenes, conversations, detail shots and panorama views are fragmented,
mixed, re-composed, and their parts rhythmically repeated as in a slow-motion
kaleidoscope. The film has been described as a formalistic experiment in the
medium of film—in the sense in which cubist paintings have been described
as formalistic studies. "Last Year at Marienbad" is not a popular
film, as it ignores all the rules of narrative fiction and the established Hollywood
dramaturgy that today’s mass audiences expect. It is, however, recognized
as one of the outstanding landmarks of modern artistic cinematography.
The film has baffled many viewers, even viewers who enjoy seeing it. As with
many works of modernism, there is no unanimously accepted explanation of its
meaning. In the following study “Last Year at Marienbad” will be
interpreted as an artistic presentation of the inner dialectic of the Cartesian
mind.
As far as a story line can be identified in the film, it can be summarized as
follows: In a spacious baroque castle, that is run as a modern luxury hotel
for an upper-class clientele, one of the guests (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to
persuade a woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they have had something like an affair
the previous year, and that this year she ought to elope with him to a new life
outside the geometric architecture and highly formal society of the establishment--away
also from the man who seems to be watching over her (Sacha Pitoeff), and who
may be her husband. In the course of various encounters and conversations the
protagonist gradually succeeds in bending the woman to his will, and at the
end of the movie the two seem to be ready to leave the splendid world of the
hotel for an unknown destination.
The characters in the film are all nameless. But in the script the protagonist
is referred to as “X,” the woman as “A,” and the presumed
husband as “M.”
"Last Year at Marienbad" starts with introductory shots of the labyrinthine
castle the baroque design of which is as consciously geometric as it is overloaded
with theatrical decorations and elaborate ornaments. We also catch first glimpses
(by way of framed prints on the walls) of the park outside with its exceedingly
regular lay-out--typical of the French garden architecture of the 17th and 18th
centuries. While the camera moves slowly through the hallways, galleries, and
salons of the hotel's seemingly endless structure, we hear the voice of the
protagonist:
I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these
galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque,
lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors--silent deserted
corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings,
marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door
frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn
on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century,
silent halls ...
The voice is solemn and monotonous, and the series of architectural shots seems
as interminable as the accumulated descriptions in the spoken text. It is out
of this hypnotic monotony that the first hints at a love story arise:
Between these walls covered with woodwork, stucco, moldings, pictures, framed
prints, among which I was walking--among which I was already waiting for you,
very far away from this setting where I now stand, in front of you, still waiting
for the man who will no longer come, who no longer threatens to come to separate
us again, to tear you away from me. Are you coming?
What seems to be addressed by the protagonist lover to the woman of his desires,
however, turns out to be spoken by an actor on a stage as a piece of dialogue
from some drama. That drama is being performed at the hotel as entertainment
for the guests. By and by the camera reveals the whole cast that presents the
conclusion of a triangle story in a somewhat stilted and melodramatic manner.
What at first seemed real, in other words, is only a performance; what appeared
natural is really only a theatrical construction. The deliberate artificiality
of the theatre scene is emphasized by the fact that the stage actors are posturing
rather than acting like ordinary people. They assimilate their demeanor to the
histrionic baroque statues that flank the stage, and that will soon be in evidence
in many other locations of the hotel's premises. The lack of naturalness and
spontaneity, as will be seen, is a pervasive feature throughout the structures
and happenings at the hotel.
Gradually we see more of the other hotel guests, who are all dressed in formal
attire, and who are engaged in polite and low-key conversations while standing
or moving about decorously and in the unobtrusive manner of an up-scale clientele.
This is decidedly a leisure class culture. Nobody is ever in a hurry; and no
one conducts any business; the everyday world of commerce and work never comes
into view in the film. Much of the guests' time is spent with typical leisure
activities and games--marksmanship competitions, ballroom dancing, dominoes,
poker, and a game without a name in which the apparent husband of the woman
invariably excels. This nameless game is played repeatedly throughout the film.
It is played by placing cards or other suitable objects in the following order:
ooooooo
ooooo
ooo
o
Two players then take turns in removing as many cards from a row as they wish--with
the restriction that the cards have to be taken from one row only each time.
(A little bit of practice will reveal that the player who takes the first card
or cards is bound to lose the game. But that is not evident by just watching
the movie once or twice--or to most of the guests who see the game played in
the story.)
X and M, the two rivals for the woman, play the game several times. M always
wins. "Can you ever lose?" X asks him at one point. "I can lose,"
M replies, "but I always win." M plays the game, as all the other
games, very ceremoniously. The games are, in fact, deliberately executed ceremonies.
They are an activity whose very essence is structure—or form for form’s
sake. Moving inside regular structures, and acting according to clear and prescribed
rules, is the deeply felt need of the hotel society portrayed in the film.
There are several encounters and conversations between X and A during which
X keeps suggesting that they have known each other since last year. Where would
they have met? the woman wants to know. A's question is playful, for she does
not seem to think that the two have ever seen each other before. X's answer
is vague, and he implies that it does not really matter. He settles, however,
for Marienbad--at a hotel very similar to the one where they are now. The woman
just laughs at X's suggestion, but at times she seems to grow weary and annoyed
at X's persistent attempts to convince her of the reality of their amorous encounter
at Marienbad. After some time X's persistence seems to have its intended effect:
the woman does not outright deny their past encounter anymore, although she
still shows some resistance to the suitor's advances. X mentions some specific
details of what happened during their alleged time at Marienbad, details that
have the ring of truth to them. Eventually X even produces a bracelet and a
snapshot that are hers, and that could well have played a role in their past
encounter.
X's professed goal is to take A away. He maintains that that was their agreement--that
A would think things over for a year, and then leave with him if they should
meet again: "It was on that day [last year] that you gave me the little
bracelet. And you asked me to allow you a year, thinking perhaps that you might
test me that way... or wear me out... or forget me. But time, time doesn't count.
I've come, now, to take you away." A keeps resisting, however. Over and
over she tells X: "No, no." "Let me alone ... Please ..."
At one point X submits a more dramatic episode of their alleged past at Marienbad:
"One evening, I went up to your bedroom..." Changing images of a plush
bedroom appear in this sequences of shots. At a subsequent point X's voice describes
the details of the alleged bedroom occurrence: "At that hour, in any case,
he [M] is at the gambling table. I had warned you I would come. You didn't answer.
When I came I found all the doors ajar..." At a still later point X asserts:
"You've always been afraid. But I loved your fear that evening. I watched
you, letting you struggle a little... I loved you. There was something in your
eyes, you were alive... finally... I took you, half by force." A few moments
later X recants the rape aspect of his visit to A's bedroom: "Oh no...
Probably it wasn't by force... But you're the only one who knows that."
Still more drama is added to the story by X's tale of M's alleged jealous rage.
M, after a conversation with A in her bedroom, leaves--supposedly to exercise
with other male guests at the hotel's shooting gallery. X intends to use M's
absence to pay A a visit. Unexpectedly M reenters A's bedroom, brandishing his
pistol. He shoots A, who comes to lie on a rug in a lascivious posture. The
alleged incident is conveyed both by images and words.
Before long X recants this whole story, however: "No, this isn't the right
ending... I must have you alive..." The fact that X begins to treat details
of last year's events at Marienbad like obvious fictions of a conventional movie
drama naturally casts doubts on the entirety of his allegations concerning their
affair. It begins to look as if X is putting fabricated ideas into A's head,
ideas that she is increasingly inclined to treat as reality, and on the basis
of which she eventually is willing to follow through with X's proposed elopement
scenario.
In the end we see A in traveling clothes, waiting in a lobby for X and the clock's
stroke of midnight--the deadline she has set in order to give M a chance to
prevent her from leaving. The clock strikes, X appears, and A gets up to leave
with him. A little later M appears, troubled, in the vacant lobby, and then
walks to his suite. The last shot of the film is of the castle looming darkly
in the night, while X's voice defines the conclusion of the story: "The
park of this hotel was a kind of garden a la francaise without any trees or
flowers, without any foliage... Gravel, stone, marble and straight lines marked
out rigid spaces, surfaces without mystery. It seemed, at first glance, impossible
to get lost here... down straight paths, between the statues with frozen gestures
and the granite slabs, where you were now already getting lost, forever, in
the calm night, alone with me."
In the Labyrinth of Solipsism
One of the things that characterizes "Last Year at Marienbad" as modernistic
is the deliberate indeterminacy of the plot. The viewer can never be quite sure
about what is happening at the hotel, let alone about what happened a year earlier
at "Marienbad.” Does A ever believe what X is telling her? Have X
and A ever met in the past? Is the enigmatic M the woman's husband? Is X in
love with A, or is he playing some sort of elaborate game that has nothing to
do with amorous feelings? And if there has been an encounter at Marienbad, which
of the individual events mentioned or depicted in the film are real, and which
ones are fantasies, projections, or outright fabrications? All we ever have
to go on is what X tells us, and what he conveys is uncertainty about alleged
facts as much as a report of these facts. What is important is that all the
above questions are in principle unanswerable. The film never provides the viewer
with the means to tell what is real and what is fictitious. A closer look at
the details of the scenes and events in question will show that Robbe-Grillet
and Resnais went out of their way to make sure that everything in their story
is and remains ambiguous and uncertain.
At first X maintains, for example, that he has met A at Frederiksbad. When A
protests that she has never been there, X replies: "Well, then it was somewhere
else, maybe, at Karlstadt, at Marienbad, or at Baden-Salsa--or even here, in
this salon." Nothing in the film ever pinpoints the exact locations of
the alleged past events--as little as it determines the reality of crucial details.
Even the presumably unforgettable act of rape is left hovering between possibility
and fact. Pieces of seemingly hard evidence of past encounters, such as the
bracelet and the snapshot, are quickly discounted as proofs of anything. Concerning
the photograph, for example, A points out that “anyone could have taken
the snapshot, at any time, and anywhere: the setting was vague, remote, scarcely
visible..." All these uncertainties about important events go together
with the film's practice of frequently showing details as different when they
should be the same. A's bedroom is furnished quite differently every time it
is shown, and sometimes A is wearing different dresses even within the same
scene or during the same conversation. It is the basic strategy of the film
to eliminate systematically the difference between fact and fiction, between
inner thought and external event..
The ambiguities and uncertainties that characterize the story are not a matter
of memories that fail here and there--because too much time has passed, or because
the events in question were too trivial, or for some other realistic reason.
Rather, the makers of "Last Year in Marienbad" consciously set out
to expose or present everything in the film as a deliberate artifice. "Last
Year at Marienbad" is sometimes described as "the story of a persuasion"--the
story of a man who attempts to convince a woman of the reality of certain past
events, and thereby to persuade her to elope with him. What we see in the film,
however, is not a persuasion in any realistic sense at all. The things X tries
to persuade A to accept are too fantastic, too implausible, or too incoherent
to be believable for even a very gullible person. "What is your name?"
A asks X during a somewhat intimate rendez-vous in the park of the hotel. "It
doesn't matter," X replies. This can hardly be a conversation among two
people who have had a significant encounter a year earlier, and who have made
an arrangement to meet again and to possibly elope. It would not even be a plausible
exchange among the two if they had met at the hotel just a few days ago. The
exchange is more like a dreamy philosophical meditation that the authors have
put into the protagonists' mouths. It has the same function of rendering the
story non-realistic as X's "recollection" of M's jealous rage. When
X says that M shot A with his marksmanship pistol, and then recants his report
because it would not be a suitable ending of the story, he clearly indicates
the fictional nature of the whole Marienbad yarn. If the report of M's violent
act is an obvious fiction, any other alleged happening might obviously be the
same. And revealing the fictional nature of his tales to A cannot help to "persuade"
the woman. "Last Year at Marienbad" does not tell a story about uncertain
memories and conflicting feelings, but is a deliberately incoherent composition
of materials gathered from conventional triangle stories and the fantasies of
their readers and viewers.
The over-all implication of composing facts, presumed facts, memories, fantasies,
possibilities, wishes, and things that can be either past or present into one
continuous flow of cinematic sequences is the creation of an artistic space
in which all visible and audible happenings are on the same ontological level.
The difference between real and imaginary, present and past, or actual and possible
are systematically eliminated in this space. The structure of the story is not
shaped by the logic of realistic external conditions and events, and it does
not provide the viewer with an objective framework of space and time. It represents,
rather, the subjective order of emerging and disappearing memories, fantasies,
desires, projections, and a host of other purely inner experiences. In the Introduction
to the printed version of his screenplay Robbe-Grillet talks about his and Resnais'
intention to "construct a purely mental space and time--those of dreams,
perhaps, or of memory, those of any affective life--without worrying too much
about the traditional relations of cause and effect, or about an absolute time
sequence in the narrative."
To the extent that this "purely mental space and time" is cut off
from any objective reality against which it can be checked, i. e., to the extent
that it is impossible within the film to determine with certainty whether any
event is real or fictional, the flow of images, thoughts, and events of “Last
Year at Marienbad” is the equivalent of the self-contained, solitary mind
of the Cartesian self. The whole sequence of events conveyed by the film is
like the interior monologue of one individual—presumably that of X. Descartes
holds that all we can really be certain of is that we experience something--the
content of our minds. Whether the content of my mind corresponds to anything
outside my mind I cannot possibly know. I seem to have the experience of seeing
a world and other people around me, but I can never be entirely sure whether
these experiences are merely mental, like a dream, or whether they are caused
by real things and people outside my mind. The world experienced by a Cartesian,
in other words, is in principle like the flow of events and images presented
in "Last Year at Marienbad." It is a world which I cannot leave, and
the reality of which (its ontological status) I cannot determine. It is a world
in which nothing may be real, and in which I may, indeed, be the only existing
being.
The whole story of “Last Year at Marienbad” is ultimately the dialectic
of the Cartesian mind—its imprisonment in itself, and its anxious attempts
to get out and to find a real world and other human beings. X’s important
desire is not to win A, it is not an amorous passion. It is, rather, the Cartesian’s
attempt to escape from solipsism. X’s courtship is an ontological quest.
His anxiety is that of the Cartesian individual who wants to make sure that
there is something real beyond the contents of his own mind, and that there
are other beings like himself. The hotel is the labyrinth of the Cartesian mind
that inspires the search for a way out, but that also reveals every seeming
exit as yet another part of the labyrinth. This is also shown by another way
in which X tries to escape from the Cartesian world.
In spite of the systematic ambiguities concerning the plot of "Last Year
at Marienbad," the film does tell some sort of story. The story describes
a love triangle the basic schema of which has served as a basis for countless
literary and cinematic productions: A man challenges another man for the affection
and loyalty of a woman. The woman is shown to agonize about the choice she has
to make. What is challenged in this particular drama, however, is not just the
relationship between A and M, but an entire social establishment and its corresponding
mind-set. X does not just want to win A, he also wants to overcome the conditions
of a society and a life that are based on Cartesian principles.
X is clearly an outsider among the inhabitants of the hotel: He speaks with
a slight accent, and he consistently loses when he plays the game without a
name with M, the man who is fully integrated in the hotel society, and who seems
to be the unbeatable master in that field of contest. X does not waste much
time on polite conversations, social games, or other distractions; he is single-mindedly
engaged in the conquest of A as a way of combating the Cartesian world of the
hotel. (At one point X may have learned that the only way to avoid defeat in
the nameless game is to refuse to play it—to refuse to make the first
move whenever M challenges him to do so.)
X is a determined rebel. He conceives of himself as a contender of life against
the deadness of the Cartesian world. He sees that the architecture of the hotel
and its park is not only unnatural, but decidedly anti-nature, and he abhors
the lethal grip that geometry has on nature and life. Although the following
words are spoken by another man, they express X's own frustration that is caused
by the stifling effect of the hotel's artificial environment on human emotions
and relationships: "A garden reassuringly arranged, with clipped bushes,
and regular paths where we walk with measured steps, side by side, day after
day, within arm's reach but without ever coming an inch closer to each other,..."
X's own critical summary of the hotel's Cartesian world is expressed in the
following description:
I have never heard anyone raise his voice in this hotel--no one... The conversations
developed in the void, as if the sentences meant nothing, were intended to mean
nothing in any case. And a sentence, once begun, suddenly remained in suspension,
as though frozen by the frost... But starting over afterwards, no doubt, at
the same point, or elsewhere. It didn't matter. It was always the same conversations
that recurred, the same absent voices. The servants were mute. The games were
silent, of course. It was a place of relaxation, no business was discussed,
no projects were undertaken, no one ever talked about anything that might arouse
the passions. Everywhere there were signs: Silence, Quiet.
For X this Cartesian environment is not the secure and untroubled world that
it might be for the troubled followers of Descartes, but a prison that mortifies
everything that is lively in the human spirit: "There were always walls--everywhere,
around me--smooth, even, glazed, without the slightest relief, there were always
walls..." "Always walls, always corridors, always doors--and on the
other side, still more walls."
X's struggle against the Cartesian world is connected with his pursuit of A
because he sees that A may succumb to the dead life of the hotel. Basically
X distinguishes A from the rest of the crowd because he sees certain signs of
life in her: "I told you that you looked alive," he once tells her.
Sometimes, however, A herself stands motionless and with a vacant gaze among
the emptily chatting guests and the theatrical decorations; the script describes
her on those occasions as "statuesque." And even when she is engaged
in seemingly lively conversations with others, X fears that her liveliness may
be less than genuine: "You were taking part in the conversation with an
animation that seemed false to me." A's liveliness, in other words, may
sometimes or often have been of the sort that one sees on a stage; her seemingly
engaged conversation may have been a social performance. X intends to rescue
her from such empty liveliness.
At first sight X seems to win his struggle against the Cartesian world: At the
end of the film X and A, in traveling clothes, leave the hotel to start a new
and different life somewhere else. A closer look at the ending of the film suggests
otherwise, however. X's last words state explicitly that the pair is getting
lost in the very world that they are seemingly leaving: in the Cartesian park
with its clipped bushes and regular pathways that add up to a giant labyrinth.
Proceeding from the inside of the building to the open spaces of the park represents,
to be sure, a certain escape or liberation. (It is significant that earlier
in the movie the pair was increasingly shown outside the walls of the hotel.)
But the gardens of the park are still part of the hotel, part of the Cartesian
world. In taking their leave X and A are not getting very far. All they accomplish
is a certain variation of their life inside the Cartesian world. Hence their
subdued and ritualistic way of moving in the final scene--entirely unlike passionate
lovers who have found each other and who are joyfully escaping from confinement
and oppression. All they do is enact the stage play that was shown at the beginning
of the film. What they say and do is not spontaneous and free, but part of a
studied ritual. Hence also the fact that the very last picture is that of the
dark and looming castle which, although the camera is moving away from it, "seems
to grow larger and larger" (according to the screenplay).
In his famous Dream Argument Descartes reminds us that waking up from a dream
can itself be part of a dream. No matter how awake we feel, we may still be
asleep and in the grip of a dream. There is no possible way of getting "outside"
of our minds to determine in what state we actually are; inescapably we remain
imprisoned in our minds. It is similar with X's and A's escape from the hotel.
Although X and A rebel against the confinements of the world of the castle,
and although they intend to leave their present life by going "somewhere
else,” their futile rebellion is nothing more than yet another variation
of life at the hotel. The end of the theatrical and ceremonial life is itself
a ritual and part of the show.
(From Jorn K. Bramann: The Educating Rita Workbook,
Copyright © 2004.)