Last year at Marienbad (1961)

*spoiler alert, if this is even a meaningful perspective here*

Quite a few years ago, I read one of Robbe-Grillet's novels, I think it was called Stone eyes (La Jalousie??) or something. Even though now and then I began to suspect that he applies a far too strict idea of "style" (one that will always, so to speak, break down more or less), I think I can say that I enjoyed the reading experience. In that book, Robbe-Grillet has this idea of objectivity, writing, as it were, "from a non-human perspective", trying to describe actions as if they were events in nature - ideally, the reader is to perceive (or try to perceive) cheating & paranoia on the same level as a stone rolling down a cliff. Of course, the book was packed with ambiguities. Maybe that was the point. The disengaged observer ended up coming out like a peeping tom. I don't know. From what I remember of the book, all scenes were broken down into minuscule events, like the play of sunshine on jalousies, or a spider climbing on a wall. I also remember there were a lot of repetition, which had a quite hypnotic effect on me. (I read the book in Swedish, because, as you may or may not know, I am GW Bush when it comes to learning languages.)

Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad, released in 1961, one of Alain Resnais' more well-known films (along with, for example, Night and Fog). A voiceover introduces us to a hotel. He talks about corridors, statues, carpets. He starts talking about a married woman who he meets at the hotel. He recapitulates his memories of their earlier encounters, a year ago, how he stood waiting for her, what they said to each other, in what parts of the hotel they were walking around. Soon, the woman is also brought into the story, and her point of view is different from that of the man. She recalls no encounter, she questions each and every "memory" that the man presents as his own. These "conversations" are accompanied by scenes from the hotel. Sometimes, the woman and the man are present in them. Whose memories is it that we see? The man's? Some of the things that goes on in the scenes are left unexplained. A sudden scream, a sense of dread, a threat of some kind. We see some men occupied by an enigmatic game. We see a play. We see the garden, the statues in the garden, the woman's room. All this is re-shown, over and over again, with small variations. But still, somehow, the story moves on. Not in the sense that we necessarily get a clearer sense of what is going on, but at least the descriptions are providing us with more and more bits and pieces of information. In that way, Last Year at Marienbad has the touch of a detective story, a mystery. But what, exactly is the mystery here? The man insists on his story about his encounters with the married woman, while she denies it. Do we know the reasons for these discrepancies? No, not as far as I can see, but as the story moves on, I start to wonder what is persuasion, the man's attempt to lure the lady away from her man, and what is simply "accounts of what happened". (And some hints that the man clearly does not *want* to rember or give a clear account of, hints of violence, perhaps? Or was it all about wishful thinking?) What complicates the matter further, is that scenes from the past and the present seem to intermingle, and it is impossible, I think, to know which is which.

All this makes the film even more enigmatic. We know nothing about the persons, neither do we know anything about the tension between them. I came to think of the French movie La Moustache (2005), highly recommended kafkaesque nightmare! And it is hard not to mention David Lynch in this connection; Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire have both stolen quite a few tricks from Resnais' mystery story.