Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
L'année dernière à Marienbad (original title)
94 min

Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Alain Robbe-Grillet (scenario and dialogue)
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi and Sacha Pitoëff

Country: France | Italy
Language: French

L'Année dernière à Marienbad is a 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. The dream-like nature of the film has fascinated and baffled audiences and critics, some hailing it as a masterpiece, others finding it to be incomprehensible.

At a social gathering at a château or baroque hotel, a man approaches a woman. He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced that she is waiting there for him. The woman insists they have never met. A second man, who may be the woman's husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man, including beating him several times at a mathematical game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships among the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as "A", the first man is "X", and the man who may be her husband is "M".(Wikipedia)

Awards:
The film won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. In 1962 it won the critics' award in the category Best Film of the Syndicat Français de la Critique de cinéma in France. The film was selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 34th Academy Awards in 1962, but was not accepted as a nominee.However, it was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay (Alain Robbe-Grillet) and it was also nominated for a Hugo Award as Best Dramatic Presentation.
The film was refused entry to the Cannes Film Festival because the director, Alain Resnais, had signed Jean-Paul Sartre's Manifesto of the 121 against the Algeria War.

Rating: 95% (Rotten Tomatoes Critics)

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