Last Year at Marienbad

Synopsis

In a vast and opulent hotel, an unnamed man (Giogio Albertazzi) attempts to persuade a similarly unnamed married woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they have not only met before, but they were also romantically involved and had planned to escape together. The woman recalls no such encounter and so begins a sensual and philosophical examination into the uncertainty of truth.

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal visual poem has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. A surreal fever dream, or perhaps a nightmare, Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), written by the radical master of the New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-bedecked château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.

French language with English subtitles.