SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 168 - Last Year at Marienbad

so I'll take the pleasure of saying "I told you so" and tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed this.

I guess I'm going to have to go back and watch this film. Its one of the ones I missed, I didn't want to but I didn't have much time that week.
 
Ok, so first things first: I was saying that I couldn't remember if I'd seen this (no pun intended). Well, it turns out that I'd never seen it in full but the reason that I was confused was because I did see the first 10 minutes or so in an old ass undergrad film school class. But this was my first proper viewing. Like I was saying last night (technically earlier this morning), the Kubrick influence is MASSIVE. That balcony shit is straight-up Barry Lyndon, all of the hotel shit is straight-up The Shining, and all the hallucinatory memory/fantasy stuff is straight-up Eyes Wide Shut. There's even little specific shit like the way that the scene when X is recounting the incident when he broke into one of A's conversations and everyone looks at him which is (in Mike Goldberg voice) virtually identical to the Tom Cruise "unmasking" scene in Eyes Wide Shut.

So the Kubrick nerd-out was a huge plus for me. But beyond that, the film itself was fascinating. I am a narrative man, so I prefer stuff like Rashomon and Persona, for instance, both of which play with/complicate narrative conventions (if not narrative itself) but which nevertheless have pretty strong narrative anchors, but the "absence" of narrative in Last Year at Marienbad worked very well given the themes involved. For a large chunk of the beginning, I thought that the "point" was that the real main character of the film was the hotel itself. Sort of in the vein of, "If a space/place were sentient, what would it 'think' or 'remember' about the people/events that it would've 'seen' over time?" I do think that that's a big part of the narrative (to the extent that there is one), but since narrative itself is being fucked with, you can't say that that's the plot, or the point, because nothing here is singular.

Another
plot involves what I would describe as a man seeking acknowledgment. Now this is coming from my years of reading Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who wrote insightfully and profoundly on the concept of acknowledgment (and its connection to the concept of passion, in all of its meanings/connotations), particularly in the realm of relationships and often with reference to films (from Adam's Rib to Letter from an Unknown Woman to Smiles of a Summer Night). I love the line from Road Trip about how "If you can't really remember it, it never really took place." Well, Last Year at Marienbad feels like a discourse on the question: If you can remember it but nobody else will acknowledge it, did it really take place? There are further questions - like, "What does it say about A that she refuses to acknowledge her past with X (assuming they had one)?" - but the most interesting question to me was what happens, how you go on, when "reality," so to speak, throws you back upon your memory, even makes you question the reliability of your memory (if not memory itself).

So, essentially, if you want to reduce a film like this to "what it's about," I'd say that it's about time (specifically about memory, nostalgia, regret, dreams, imagination, etc., and the tenuous links that we establish with the past and even with our own identities) and space (specifically about places as emotional way stations). If that's not a solid enough anchor, then this is going to be a rough movie for you, but it was enough of an anchor for me to enjoy the "story" and the "story" was told interestingly enough to hook me and keep me hooked from beginning to end.

On that point, I thought that it was an aesthetically beautiful film. Everything here - the cinematography, the editing, the music, the production design, the costume design, literally everything - was top-notch. I loved the floating camerawork through the hotel hallways, I loved the frequent shots of people (usually A but not always) seemingly dwarfed or engulfed by the exterior or interior spaces, I loved the kooky edits (especially those quick cuts of A in her room and then the montage of her with open arms), I loved the voice-over and how things would shift almost imperceptibly between voice-over (ostensibly non-diegetic dialogue) and conversation (diegetic dialogue). Definitely an aesthetic tour-de-force.

So yeah, very glad to have finally seen this. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I loved it, and I definitely wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's for sure a great film, deservedly regarded as a classic and a must-see, and a film I'm sure I'll return to more than once. Hell, I might use the opening for the aesthetic analysis unit of one of my upcoming classes :D

The best take I'v seen is that its a representation of Robbe-Grillet's kind of meta novel, so its essential de construction of fiction.

I absolutely think that that's there, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that that's the point, or that that's what the film's about. That meta aspect really only kicks in towards the end, and while it's very cool and interesting to watch, it felt to me like a smaller component of a larger whole rather than a/the driving force of the film.

I enjoyed the first half a lot. All that disorienting luxury and the flow of generic encounters and slow focus on the couple and the statue. There was kind of tremendous climax of intercutting a bar scene with "flashbacks", but after that the movie got tedious. It seemed to run out of steam until the last sentence of the movie woke me up into nice Borgesian paradoxical hyperreality.

Huh. I actually found myself fading a bit in the middle but then it kicked into another gear and far from losing steam I found that it picked up steam and took me through to the end.

Too bad that the latter half lacks the playfulness and cultural richness of the Argentinian magical realism it’s inspired by [...] Last Year in Marienbad has the heavy-handed stamp of self-importance by the French intelligentsia. I wonder what it would have looked like if it had been directed by some good old Pole emigrant like Polanski, Borowczyk or Zulavski or the Argentinian born Gaspar Noe.

A "playful" Last Year at Marienbad would've sucked IMO. It needed to feel heavy and serious because what it was dealing with has an inherent weight and vitality. If this would've been handled the way that Polanski handled Cul-de-sac, for example, with that sort of tone/vibe/progression, then it would've been...well...as awful as Cul-de-sac :oops:

For me the biggest problem for really enjoying Last Year in Marienbad was, that A (the woman) was such a blank slate that X's (the man) obsession with her was a bit baffling

Baffling? Could you not see her, dude? Guaranteed the hottest blank slate X ever encountered ;)

What happens when you make a movie that deliberately ignores the space-time continium?

I would argue that the film doesn't ignore the space-time continuum, the film treats it the way that it's treated in memory and dreams.

It's a mess, structurally and pretty much everywhere else.

But the mess was intentional, it was planned, it was even organized. It's like Monica's junk closet: It looks like a mess compared to what you're used to seeing, but even the mess is organized with everything in its proper place :D

If I spoke French fluently (I'm barely conversational) then maybe I could get into this, but having to read subtitles while an unstable narrative plays before me, it's a tough sell.
I also think that there's a ton lost at least for me when reading the subtitles instead of understanding the dialogue when watching this movie.

I've "read" more movies than I could ever hope to count, but this was the first time that I ever felt truly at a loss for not being able to speak the film's language. It'd obviously be easier if I knew Japanese and didn't need subtitles for Kurosawa movies, or Swedish for Bergman movies, or Russian for Tarkovsky movies, or even Cantonese and Mandarin for martial arts movies (mainly because the English subs are often so insanely different), but given the way that Last Year at Marienbad plays with sound, with the whispers and the fading in and out of dialogue and voice-over, I imagine that being able to listen to rather than read it would be a massive game changer.

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just when i thought i had you figured out.

I'm unfigureoutable :cool:

you've always given me the impression that narrative takes precedence over all else, so color me shocked that you vibed w/ a film that very much favors form over story.

Narrative for sure takes precedence generally speaking. And, like I was saying earlier, I'll still give the nod to something like Persona over Last Year at Marienbad because narrative plays a bigger role. But I can hit the occasional curveball ;)

Nolan said he never saw Last Year at Marienbad? really? well i see your Inception & raise you Memento. am i/are we just crazy to see Marienbad's greasy fingerprints all over those films?

I'm so obsessively in love with Inception that I didn't even think about Memento, but yeah, both of them are Marienbadish. With Inception in particular, there's a scene in Last Year at Marienbad where X and A are leaning on the balcony railing and (the same way it happens to Leo in Inception) I had a flash of that image of Cobb and Mal on the bridge.

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I literally paused the movie and went to Google to look up Nolan's relationship to Last Year at Marienbad and I found an interview with him saying that he didn't see it until after he finished Inception:

"Everyone was accusing me of ripping it off, but I actually never got around to seeing it. Funnily enough, I saw it and I'm like, 'Oh, wow. There are bits of Inception that people are going to think I ripped straight out of Last Year at Marienbad.' Basically, what it means is, I'm ripping off the movies that ripped off Last Year at Marienbad, without having seen the original. It's that much a source of ideas, really, about the relationships between dream and memory and so forth, which is very much what Inception deals with. But we have way more explosions."

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I don't know, man...

I consider The Shining a perfect movie except for the ending, which I hate. Getting lost inside a labyrinth is such an obvious metaphor and yet visually boring winter wonderland suspense premise, that it somewhat ruins the movie for me. Pretty much every scene inside the mazelike hotel was more interesting than the climax.

Come on, man: He's always been the caretaker :D

I guess I'm going to have to go back and watch this film. Its one of the ones I missed, I didn't want to but I didn't have much time that week.

I actually haven't seen The Tenant, so I don't know if there are any resonances there, but even if there aren't any, I'd say that no matter what you think of it, even if you can't finish it, Last Year at Marienbad is at least worth checking out.
 
A "playful" Last Year at Marienbad would've sucked IMO. It needed to feel heavy and serious because what it was dealing with has an inherent weight and vitality. If this would've been handled the way that Polanski handled Cul-de-sac, for example, with that sort of tone/vibe/progression, then it would've been...well...as awful as Cul-de-sac :oops:
The first half was playful and shit just got too serious. Or maybe I just got bored reading the subtitles while The Dude X was rambling his endless monologues.

Baffling? Could you not see her, dude? Guaranteed the hottest blank slate X ever encountered ;)
Hah, I was watching Mamet’s Spanish Prisoner the other night. It turned out to be kind of a metathriller too, though a bit futile exercise. This morning after I read your smokeshow comment I thought, that if Mamet would have made a remake and cast his regular Rebecca Pidgeon as The Lady, I’d probably be hooked until the end.
 
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