last year at marienbad (d. alain resnais, w. alain robbe-grillet)

This remains an astonishing, formally brilliant film. In spite of the archness of the narrative and setting, there’s an undercurrent of brutal humanity. Delphine Seyrig’s enigmatic posturing conceals the fact that this is a film about choices. The choices made in relationships which are pivotal, determining our fate: a relationship might be a stay in a luxury hotel or it might become a stay in prison. Like the film’s recurring motif, the game of Nic, which is always won by Seyrig’s husband, our capacity to determine our own fate is denied by the logic of a game we fail to understand. Someone else is always winning. In this sense there also appears to be a strong echo in Robbe-Grillet’s radical script of Beckett’s quiet nihilism. The characters are trapped in a Godotian conundrum, one whose logic the viewer can intuit without ever really understanding. This lends the film an interpretative ambiguity. Is the hotel heaven or the hell of a concentration camp or the decline and fall of Western Civilisation? Watching the film for the first time in twenty five years, (when Mr C and I watched it on video in his Kilburn flat, a viewing which clearly influenced the Boat People), it resembles nothing so much as Jaramuschian zombie film, a far more complex and darker narrative than that director’s faded aristo opus, Only Lovers Left Alive. Marienbad has the prophetic power of a greek tragedy, no more so than in the director/ screenwriter’s use of the statue of a man and a woman poised on the brink of danger. In a more classical screeenwriting scenario, it might have been suggested that the interpretations of the statue not be articulated (who’s holding who back, what it really means, etc). However, here the novelist’s articulation works, precisely because it is not done to elucidate or clarify, but to further confuse. Words are part of the puzzle, a puzzle the viewer is constantly failing to solve, and the watching process is far more engaging for our failure to understand than it would be if we had a clear idea of what the film was trying to say.