L' Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) poster & wallpaper

Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff

In a huge, old-fashioned luxury hotel a stranger tries to persuade a married woman to run away with him, but it seems she hardly remembers the affair they may have had (or not?) last year at Marienbad...( read more  read more... ).

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Unrated, 1 hr. 24 min.

Directed by: Alain Resnais

Release Date: June 25, 1961

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DVD Release Date: February 23, 1999

Stats: 482 reviews

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X A and X A and X A A and X A 'L' Année Dernière à Marienbad' A A and X Last Year At Marienbad Last Year at Marienbad Last Year at Marienbad Last Year at Marienbad Last Year at Marienbad Last Year at Marienbad
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Flixster Reviews (482)

  • her69eyes
    July 5, 2009
    her69eyes
    Four rows of matchsticks are set on a table in sets of seven, five, three, and one. Each player takes turns removing as many matchsticks as they want as long as it's from the same row. The player with the last matchstick loses. M (Sascha Pitoeff) always wins.

    The on-lookers of t...( read more)his game ponder the solution. Perhaps you are only supposed to take one each turn, or atleast an odd number? Maybe the loser is always the person who makes the first move? X (Giorgia Albertazzi) strategies with these suggestions in mind. His efforts are still thwarted.

    This famous, or infamous, game comes from "Last Year at Marienbad", the 1961 film from Nouvelle Vague director Alain Resnais. The game reflects the film itself - it's an unsolvable puzzle, a mystery in which everyone is bound to form their own opinion or theory. That doesn't matter to the artist, the director, the host of the game. Things continue to happen, whether or not we know why they're happening. The longer you try and wrap your brain around the film, or the game, the further you sink.

    The film concerns a handsome nameless man called X. His purpose is to convince A (Delphine Seyrig), a beautiful woman who may or may not be married, that they had met the year before. And not only did they meet, they were lovers that promised to return to the location one year after. He's a terribly suggestive man, and therefore we cannot decipher which memories are legitimate and which are falsely constructed through X's persuasions. The other character, perhaps the most confusing, is M. He has some sort of relationship with A, and he's the master of the matchstick/card game. At one point, he shoots A. Then, X says that it didn't happen that way. So he didn't shoot her.

    Resnais has claimed that the film has no solution - it's a maze with no exit. That has not stopped legions of followers from analyzing it frame-by-frame to understand the purpose of each camera movement and line of dialogue. If I had to consider my own interpretation, i'd agree with the idea that it's a film about storytelling. X is the storyteller, and A and M are his pawns. It doesn't matter what he tells them to do as he has the power to erase. He can even drastically change their costumes. He's a director, an author, a storyteller.

    The film isn't only stimulating intellectually - it's perhaps one of the most gorgeous films you'll ever see. One cannot fathom this movie being in anything other than black-and-white, which give it a timeless and dreamlike feeling. Furthering the dreamlike atmosphere is the way the camera smoothly weaves around the room, and each of the calculated and specific movements (or non-movements) of the characters. It's elegant visuals are so jaw-dropping that you'll want to pause every few moments if only to take in each frame for another few seconds.

    "Last Year at Marienbad" is not for everybody, but it's something everybody should see if only to argue about. It's unlike anything that's been done before or since, and it's purpose will spark endless debate by even the most casual of movie-goers. A fascinating film, a true gem that is completely unforgettable.
  • kenstachnik
    May 9, 2008
    kenstachnik
    Beautifully shot and mind numbingly pretentious, this piece of film art is worth seeing for it's stylistic influences alone. An obvious influence on Kubrick's the Shining.

    The multiple time lines and non linear story telling style may infuriate some viewers.
  • columbiatch
    July 8, 2007
    columbiatch
    Stranger - We met a year ago.


    Woman - No, we didn't.


    Stranger - Yes we did.


    Woman - Go Away, you're insane.


    The End


    On a more serious note, this may be the most bizarre yet poetic and hypnotic movie I've ever seen. Resnais takes the seamless transitions b...( read more)etween past, present, and future he introduced in Hiroshima Mon Amour to a whole new level. In this film temporal and spacial relationships are completely shattered. There is no sense of which scenes are set in the present and which are set in another time. As a result the film feels like a dream, or rather a nightmare. This has some of the most interesting cinematography I've ever seen. There is this one shot where there are people in this garden.


    The people cast shadows, but the triangular trees that align the garden have none. I have no idea how Resnais shot this. The plot is simple: A man meets a woman in a salon and claims that they had a romantic affair a year ago. The woman denies that they have ever met. The man tries to convince her that they did by recalling his memories/imagination of their encounter. I can't say I understood this film and I don't think that there is a solution to this puzzle.
  • mjgildea
    November 5, 2006
    mjgildea
    An amazing looking film that makes you feel like you're drunk.
  • Dracula787
    October 8, 2009
    Dracula787
    This is a movie with a very creative and haunting visual style and it has a narrative filled with interesting ideas. That should be a perfect mix, but unfortunately I it felt to me like the creative visuals didn?t really compliment the creative story all that well and vice versa...( read more). Of the two elements I probably liked the visuals better, the way Resnais films the hotel this takes place in a beautiful and haunting, I have a hunch that this was an inspiration for the way Kubrick filmed The Shining. However, I?m not sure that this slow, sterile, and artful style was really a good choice to convey the talky, passionate, and emotional story at the center of it all. The whole thing was generally very slow, I got an Antonioni vibe from the whole thing and that is not a compliment.
  • niek123
    November 20, 2009
    niek123
    A poetic and dream-like remembrance of an affair. Very, VERY French. But quite fascinating too.
  • ElCochran90
    October 18, 2009
    ElCochran90
    "Empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets. Heavy hangings. Stairs, steps. Steps, one after the other. Glass objects, objects still intact, empty glasses. A glass that falls, three, two, one, zero. Glass partition, lette...( read more)rs."

    L'ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD (1961)


    Director: Alain Resnais
    Country: France
    Genre: Drama / Romance
    Length: 94 minutes

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    The filmic style of Alain Resnais had the remarkable talent of completely staying away from the revolutionary cinematic movement denominated French New Wave and had the guts of literally playing with cinema and modifying its usual structural grammar. With Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), film that counted with the unparalleled brilliant contribution of acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, Resnais could offer a different perspective of a non-linear and poetical storytelling never seen in cinema before. His next true masterpiece called L'Année Dernière à Marienbad allowed him to perfect his style, not exactly resorting to surrealism in its purest form, but rather introducing a hypnotic cinematic subjectivity dependent on the viewer's own interpretation of the dreamlike sequences and events. Consciously or not, directors that go from Stanley Kubrick to David Lynch have referenced either this masterpiece specifically or his overall direction style. L'Année Dernière à Marienbad is an influential triumph which greatness and talent depend on originality of storytelling and in an effective ambition displayed through a talented execution.

    We are introduced for the first 10 minutes to a considerably luxurious and spacious hotel where several upper-class individuals wander through its corridors, salons and galleries, attend gatherings and dances, and discuss any issue that can come to mind. Suddenly, a married woman is starting to be stalked by a man who insists they had met before and had an affair in Marienbad, urging her to revive their lives and to run away with him. The film received an Academy Award nomination in 1963 for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen, losing it against the Italian comedy Divorzio all'Italiana (1961) directed by Pietro Germi, which is, of course, a blasphemy of a decision. On the other hand, Alain Resnais had won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival two years before.

    L'Année Dernière à Marienbad is, for a considerable percentage of the audience, the best film of the director. Although this is his second best and most overly ambitious project, the difference between the film and his previous masterpiece Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) is literally nil. Seemingly, the film improves the cinematographic technique first applied in Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), trying to poetically perfect it. The direction by Alain Resnais is overly ambitious, yet significantly attractive and though-provoking, successfully giving birth to a unique French work of art. The screenplay of this particular film is one of my favorites that have ever been created by human hands. The dialogue written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, who also shared his artistic particular vision designing the scenario of the feature film, reaches a level of perfection that had never been dreamed before. Repetition and exaggerated emphasis on the details become positive aspects for effectively serving the main purposes of L'Année Dernière à Marienbad. The final result of the screenplay is pure literary poetry painted in moving images. The photography is arguably the best technical aspect of the film. Multifaceted and talented cinematographer Sacha Vierny (Hiroshima mon Amour [1959], The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover [1989]) composes beautifully balanced shots, like the equilibrium that carries life itself. The imagery is astonishing, hypnotic, seductive, tranquil... the very mysteries of the mansion revealed; the gardens and fountains becoming live. The well-done performances have been submerged in the surrealism of the film. The music is astonishingly haunting, eerie and somewhat gothic. A soundtrack listing is not necessary, but just the notes expressing a governing dream state, seducing the mind and terrorizing it thoroughly, with the appropriate volume and unexpected interruptions.

    The camera moves through each single corridor, gallery and European landscape in a marvelously peaceful, balanced and artistic way, counting with a deep voiceover. The voiceover comes from a man who is completely dependent of his memories and self-conviction, a passionate characteristic of his personality that applies to her possibly beloved woman. The woman represents the female figure whose mind can be utterly manipulated, the weak and innocent gorgeous female that succumbs to the vastness and complexity of the mind. A hotel that encapsulates several individuals may be the symbol of the human mind, the object that possesses a memory dependent on subjectivity. Memories possibly being distorted and modified in a dreamlike fashion mirrors how varied the perspective towards life itself can be. Constant déjà vus and dialogue repetition accompanied by a severely attention to detail explanation imply the lack of objectivity that should be applied to the film. There are no names, but just characters. The characters are the only ones that matter. Black and white contrast found and revealed emotions, and past romances may represent eternal and impossible longings of the heart. Lights and shadows fall in love with romance, and incoherent shadows on the ground confuse all possible and infinite versions of an impossible truth.

    L'Année Dernière à Marienbad itself is a commentary on unfound passions and dreamed affairs based on imaged insincerities. No matter how evident the truth may seem, it is just impossible to discover. It is not meant to be discovered... perhaps not yet. The purpose of life comes along for itself, but not before the mind has acquired a certain level of maturity and self-acceptance; so do not certain epiphanies and realizations. The film suggests that dreams and memories are inexact replicas of reality and that have absurdity and surrealism as their main ingredients. Of course, no solid or clichéd conclusion was required, but just events and symbolisms. With a man whose conviction drives him to desperate measures for obtaining what it is already impossible to take back, a woman who uses her heart and the logic as her most powerful emotional weapons in case exterior events defy her psychological health, a mathematician and cold-blooded husband who demonstrates his talents through an ancient Chinese card/object game based on binary principles in a forced attempt to call for the attention of the world, endless rooms and corridors in a Baroque mansion, endless paths that may lead to one single end, interminable possibilities and a black-and-white world where light and darkness fight a passionate war, L'Année Dernière à Marienbad is an unequaled piece of work. Alain Resnais had an unlimited creativity and a big screen meant no physical obstacle for him. Shattering time to pieces and arranging them under the commands of the heart, and a realm where even the reason lives under the government of the emotions, it is a provocative journey into a romantic world of the ultimately unknown.

    100/100
  • mayorcrunch
    October 14, 2009
    mayorcrunch
    ¿Alguien podria explicarme esta pelicula? ¿Cual es su intencion, exactamente? Detras de su aire pretensioso debe haber coherencia, aunque no la encuentro.
    "Last Year at Marienbad" tiene bella cinematografia y musica incesante, dialogos misteriosos y un hombre que siempre gana u...( read more)n juego que utiliza 16 piezas (debo admitir que me intrigo el juego).
    Mas que una pelicula parece un experimento que busca poner a la audiencia en una especie de trance. Aunque quisiera decir que no es buena pelicula, algo me lo impide, aun no se exactamente que es.
  • HuskersNC949597
    October 7, 2009
    HuskersNC949597
    I wanted to hate it. . .but could not. The idea of a man trying to convince a woman they had an affair, the way it was shown, is interesting. So much so, part of me wants to see it remade in color and stuff, while the rest me of knows that probably wouldn't really fly.
  • Sloirishbud
    October 6, 2009
    Sloirishbud
    This film is a surreal masterpiece. It was often a confusing journey because this story makes a point of contradicting itself but the thing that made the film great was the artistry of it all. Everything in the film was perfect and helped with the atmosphere, the story in the fil...( read more)m was ever changing which is what made this movie captivating and at the same time confusing. I saw this film first on the big screen (which is the way I believe it is meant to be seen) and then I saw it on television, each time the disjointed nature of the story made itself apparent. The thing is, that it didn't bother me in the slightest because I had realized half way through the first time I saw this film, that it can't be judged by being compared to other movies. This film has its own set of rules that are far removed from the rules of other films. The originality of the concept and the way they delivered this film is what makes it a classic and an amazing watch. After seeing this multiple times though I am not quite sure what really did or didn't happen, Last Year at Marienbad.

View All L' Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) Reviews

Critic Reviews

January 1, 2000
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

It is a deliberate, artificial artistic construction. I watched it with a pleasure so intense I was surprised. full review

View more L' Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

Comments

  • willerror1
    May 11, 2009
    willerror1
    Back in print June 23 2009 from the Criterion Collection!

    http://www.criterion.com/films/1517
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