How Had I Never Seen... "Last Year at Marienbad"?
Friday, September 10, 2021 at 6:00PM by Nick Taylor
Where to even begin with Last Year at Marienbad? In one sense, Alan Resnais’s film announces itself as a slippery, enigmatic object from its very first image. The resplendent music, equally ominous and inviting, mixes with the opening narration like they’re from the same source. Sacha Vernig’s silvery, elegant photography, gliding through the grounds of a baroque, ornate hotel and over dozens of handsome, impossibly rich guests, immediately communicates that Resnais has built a film both ephemeral and obsidian. The editing typically feeds into this gilded fluidity, save for when it disrupts those established rhythms as some other memory and breaks through an ongoing sequence like an intrusive thought to assert its own impression. The hotel itself looks glamorously assembled, yet every tree and painting have the same energy as the obelisk from 2001. The whole place feels inevitable without being easy to read.
And yet, Last Year at Marienbad isn’t obtuse about its mysteries...