To some people it's one of the enduring masterpieces of world cinema, to others one of the most boring films ever made and to some it's simply a one-joke send-up of the kind of pretentious art movies that had still to be invented and yet even today, almost seventy years after it was made "Last Year at Marienbad" is still unique; there is, quite simply, nothing like it.
Resnais already had a reputation. In the mid-fifties he made the documentary "Night and Fog", still one of the greatest films on the Holocaust and two years before "...Marienbad" he gave us the almost equally challenging and not dissimilar "Hiroshima Mon Amour" while in the meantime Antonioni had turned the path narrative cinema might take on its head with "L'Avventura" but this was something else entirely, a feature-length avant-garde movie shot in Cinemascope and clearly meant to be seen by a large international audience and the critics embraced it with a fervor, (it won the Golden Lion at Venice).
If you want to talk about its plot you could say it's about a man and a woman who meet at a fancy baroque hotel where he tells her they had met the year before, possibly at Marienbad, while she keeps denying this ever happened. They and another man, possibly the woman's husband, are the only characters/people in the picture, (there are other 'guests' but they simply move through the film like zombies or statues brought to momentary life), and nothing happens in the picture that could be taken for reality or at least 'reality' as we know it or even as cinema usually portrays it.
From the beginning it's best to think of the whole thing as a dream but whose dream, the woman's, the man's? And to this day it remains one of the few films to capture a dream scenario with complete success, (perhaps only David Lynch has come close in the intervening years).
So what makes it great, what makes it so much more that just that bubble-busting lampoon of art-movies? Certainly not the flimsy idea behind its 'plot' but rather the treatment of that initial idea both by the writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet and by Resnais. The screenplay takes the simple idea of a relationship that may or may not be 'real' and twists it every which way, repeating moments but repeating them with variations both in the language used and in the way in which the situations are set up while Resnais follows suit with some of the most extraordinary images ever captured on widescreen. None of it may make sense yet there isn't a frame of this film you would want to miss or throw away while Giorgio Albertazzi, Delphine Seyrig and Sacha Pitoeff bring the characters who are not even named to life in ways that transcend the film's dream scenario. So by now I think you know which camp I am in; a masterpiece and no mistake.
