Last Year in Marienbad: Setting Ourselves Free from Stories and Storytelling
‘You still wait for someone who will never come. Someone who may never come, to separate us again, to take you away from me.’
'Last Year in Marienbad' is a 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It’s an elegant exploration of memory and dreams, of the process of thought. It is wilfully enigmatic. And it sets to one side conventional approaches to narrative structure.
An unnamed man (Giorgio Albertazzi) paces the long corridors of a baroque chateau hotel - past a few silent servants, past empty salons with stucco ceilings and gilt ornamentation; past hallways with sculptured doorframes, grandiose chandeliers and crystal mirrors; past potted palms and walls hung with sombre oil paintings and horticultural prints.
There’s a performance of an Ibsen play in the hotel theatre and the formally dressed audience sits in rapt concentration. When it’s over the guests talk in hushed tones. Their conversation is banal. Sometimes they stare, impassively, like statues frozen in time and space. A couple argue.
‘You confine me in a whispering silence worse than death. Like these days that we live through, side by side, and almost hand in hand - our mouths forever apart.’
Our man addresses a beautiful Chanel-clad woman whom he finds standing in a doorway (Delphine Seyrig).
‘You haven’t changed. I feel I left you only yesterday.’
He shows her round the hotel, explaining the architecture. They dance. She is amused, charmed perhaps, but cannot recollect ever having met him.
‘It was not me. You must be mistaken.’
He, however, is sure of it.
‘It was last year. Have I changed so much? Or are you pretending not to know me?’
He recalls their first encounter in the gardens at Frederiksbad. He remembers the precise location, her posture, their conversation. They had a romance and agreed to meet one year later.
‘You’ve still the same faraway eyes, the same smile, the same sudden laugh. The same way of holding out your arm to ward off something in the way, of raising your hand to your shoulder. You’re wearing the same perfume.’
The couple wander about the hotel and the opulent geometric gardens - along gravel paths, past pools, waterfalls and hedges.
And then he is alone again, walking through the labyrinth of halls, foyers and corridors, in silence.
The other guests play at cards, dominoes and matchsticks. Some compete at target practice. The woman has a partner (Sacha Pitoëff), a mournful fellow, who, whilst repeatedly winning the games, keeps a wary eye on her movements.
‘I suggest a different game, a game I always win.’
‘If you can’t lose, it’s not a game.’
’I can lose, but I always win.’
Our man encounters the woman repeatedly at different spots around the hotel. She persists in denying that they have ever met, and asks to be left alone. He begins to lose confidence in some of the details of his story. Perhaps they first made their acquaintance in Karlstadt or Baden-Salsa. Or Marienbad?
We notice that, on the various occasions we have seen the woman, she has been wearing different dresses. Conversations are repeated. The chronology and locations are scrambled. The gothic organ music of Francis Seyrig is unsettling. The people in the garden cast long shadows, but the trees do not.
'Last Year in Marienbad' is certainly puzzling.
Is the man trying to recall events or wishing them to be true? Is he an author pondering different storylines? Is he Orpheus attempting to recover Eurydice from Hades? Is he the woman’s psychoanalyst? Is it all going on in her head, not his? Did he assault her? Did her partner kill her? Is everyone dead?
Director Resnais suggested that the film explores cognitive mechanics.
'For me this film is an attempt, still very crude and very primitive, to approach the complexity of thought, of its processes.’
Whatever the explanation, we are invited to consider untrustworthy memories and illusory dreams.
We replay events in our minds, in the theatre of our imagination. We precisely recall isolated moments, fragments of conversation, while vaguely forgetting the context, the before and after. We have memories of memories. We reconstruct the past as we would wish it to have been. We reconfigure recollections to relieve our doubts, our regrets, our guilt. We are unreliable narrators of our own lives.
‘There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present. Then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score.’
Daniel Kahneman
Certainly the film was revolutionary in its day because it cast aside conventional narrative and plot development. It offered instead a complex set of thoughts, moments and impressions. And in so doing it presented a different kind of truth.
Of course, stories can be insightful, educational and entertaining. Of course, they provide reassurance. They make sense of the world. They bind us together.
But stories also reduce our understanding of the past to crude linear constructions, rationally ordered and causally connected. We instinctively find patterns in events and experiences. We assign cause and effect, agency and victimhood; heroes and villains, beginnings, middles and ends. And yet life, experience and relationships are rarely so neat. Thinking, remembering and imagining are seldom so tidy. Sometimes stories over-simplify. Sometimes narratives are partisan. And in the modern world of unchecked falsehoods, stories and narratives too easily become conspiracies.
Resnais suggests that we should occasionally hold in check our natural instinct to impose order, to locate obvious explanations. Sometimes a more compelling truth can be found if we set ourselves free from the constraints of stories and storytelling.
At the conclusion of 'Last Year in Marienbad' the couple endeavour to leave together at midnight.
'The grounds of the hotel were symmetrically arranged, without trees or flowers, or plants of any kind. The gravel, the stone and the marble were spread in strict array in unmysterious shapes. At first sight, it seemed impossible to lose your way. At first sight... Along these stone paths and amidst these statues, where you were already losing your way forever in the still night, alone with me.’
'There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed.
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall.
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all.
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.’
The Beatles, ‘In My Life’ (J Lennon / P McCartney)
No. 319
