L’année dernière à Marienbad
Alain Resnais (1961)
The atmosphere in NFT2 is hushed. A few people seem to want to chuckle to reassure themselves that watching the film is time well spent; their opportunities are rare – although it’s harder not to laugh irreverently. It’s just as well – from the point of view of not offending the majority of the audience – that, even though it’s not a long film (93 minutes), Last Year at Marienbad is long enough to get boring. It eventually wipes the smile off your face. Although I’m not among them, I can understand that the formal design of a film is sufficient to sustain, even excite, some people. I can’t understand how anyone can have any feeling (positive or negative) for the characters in this film – or therefore be absorbed by the puzzle of what did or didn’t happen to them last year at Marienbad. To that extent, this notorious film has to be a failure – in spite of the efforts of Resnais and the writer Alain Robbe-Grillet to put it out of reach of detractors – in their contemporary and subsequent interviews and writings, as well as in the fact that the film occasionally disarms you by having the voice-over narration make clear that it’s perfectly well aware of how (annoying) it sounds. The non-events occur in the rooms, corridors and grounds of a hotel the décor and gardens of which are opulent and beautiful but presented as if reflecting past glories. They appear to represent dead cultural traditions in which the people move (or, often, don’t move – held in frozen poses or tableaux) but from which they are spiritually disconnected.
There’s no doubt that setting the story in high society is a clever way of working the audience: it places the characters – and their emotionally etiolated lives – outside ordinary experience (and allows us to feel superior rather than envious). At the same time, the splendour of the accoutrements and surroundings (and the self-conscious movement of the camera around them) – even if these are emblems of something moribund – makes lots of people more comfortable that what they’re watching is a work of art than they would be if the setting were a dowdy boarding-house. It’s not clear whether the solemn, incantatory narrative (‘… du marbre … des salons … encore des salons … ‘), redolent of many decades of French poetry, is also part of the dying culture or whether it’s supposed to be deathless prose. It would be ridiculous to say that anyone could write this kind of stuff; less ridiculous to suggest that, if you can start writing it, it’s easy enough to keep going – especially if questions that crop up every so often in the dialogue and which seem to demand concrete responses are likely to be answered by ‘I don’t know’ or by ‘You know it doesn’t matter’ (the reply given to ‘What is your name?’) or by a silence.
The cast includes Delphine Seyrig, whose dark coiffure seems to constrain her but who wears her various costumes superbly; Giorgio Albertazzi, whose acting – against all the odds – sustains a thread of naturalism; and Sacha Pitoeff. He is a Modigliani figure without trying and – as the Seyrig character’s husband (or is he?) and Albertazzi’s nemesis (that at least seems clear), the most amusing character – even if this is not necessarily what Resnais and Robbe-Grillet always intend. Examples … One: in a conversation about statuary – a man, a woman and a dog – in the hotel grounds, Seyrig says, ‘The dog is very close to his mistress’ and Pitoeff replies, ‘That is because there is not much room on the plinth’. Two: Seyrig is lying on her bed (one of many such scenes) and there’s a knock on the door; she says nothing and Pitoeff comes in, saying that he knocked – when she lies that she replied to his knock, he says ‘It couldn’t have been very loud’. Three (especially): Pitoeff’s snappy routines with cards, then matchsticks, then gambling chips. These invariably maintain his psychological upper hand over Albertazzi but also – as respites from the prevailing tedium – function almost in the way that the numbers in a musical lift your spirits enough to allow you to put up with the intervening non-singing-and-dancing longueurs. Last Year at Marienbad anticipates another overrated puzzle film of more than 40 years later, Michael Haneke’s Hidden, in at least two respects. It’s obvious from an early stage that the puzzle won’t be solved – both films reek of self-congratulation in being inexplicable and, because they’re unreadable, in being (as they see themselves) hermetically sealed against criticism. And, as in Hidden, there are brief eruptions of violence for shock effect; in Marienbad this is – as screen violence – very innocuous but it’s still enough to crack the gilded surface in a startling way.
12 September 2008
