The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 16-22
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais
It would be easy to say that Last Year at Marienbad has endured because of how bottomless its enigmas are, how people are still trying to figure out what exactly happens. But maybe the appeal of Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s collaboration is much simpler than its puzzle-box surface indicates. Though Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay gestures toward mystery—whether, in fact, X (Giorgio Albertazzi) has in fact met A (Delphine Seyrig) before, and what M’s (Sacha Pitoëff) involvement with A may be—Resnais seems less concerned with plot and character than with images, theme, and mood. Cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s slow pans over the voluptuous chateau interiors forge a link to the way the camera pored over books and artifacts in Resnais’s 1957 documentary short Toute la mémoire du monde, another philosophical examination of history and memory. But with Jacques Saulnier’s glittering production designs, Francis Seyrig’s haunting organ-based score, and above all the glamour of its stars—especially Delphine Seyrig in her Coco Chanel and Bernard Evein gowns—Resnais makes it almost sinfully easy to simply sink into its landscape of desire, recollection, and regret. We may never know what really happens in Last Year at Marienbad, but the confusion remains as beautiful as ever. Kenji Fujishima (November 19, 3:30pm; November 22, 9:15pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Memorable Fantasies: Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares on Film”)