Last Year in Marienbad

L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad), 1961
Dir: Alain Resnais

After watching this all the way through while trying take it seriously, I must admit that I failed miserably. It's not that this film made me angry (though it pushed my limits a lot), it's just that nothing in this film captivated me in any way. For a movie that is only about two people being in love, you can't really care can you? The only interaction between them is just "remembering" and frankly it's either way over my head or its main points are driving at things I could care less about.


So there's this guy (Giorgio Albertazzi), and he's 100% positive that he met and fell in love with a woman (Delphine Seyrig) at some chateau the year before (possibly not the one they meet at again in the film, or is that a memory as well?). The woman is 100% sure that the dude is a creep and a stalker who has never met her, until she isn't (or is that even her?) Her (possible) husband (Sacha Pitoëff) is semi-interested in her well-being, but mostly likes to house people in Nim (which is probably some grand gesture about memory and dreams).


In Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) we actually get interaction and, at the very least, we begin to understand the characters and their motivations. Here, we don't and because of this there is absolutely no room to care. If you want to say that anything is truly frustrating about this, it's that Resnais nails the mood and look of a film that should be interesting, but breaks it apart so that it isn't. Maybe I just get really turned off by metafiction (which granted works a lot better in film than literature, but still...). I wouldn't be surprised if some interpretations led to some grand realization about life. It is a puzzle I guess, and Resnais deliberately only gives us some of the pieces. The film has all of the answers or it has none of them (look at the photo below: the people have shadows but the trees don't), but either way, it's just not a film for me.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959
Dir: Alain Resnais

There are some big ups and big downs in this film. The fact that it was initially supposed to be a documentary about Hiroshima is pretty apparent. The beginning is kind of unbearable; my mind couldn't latch on to anything, even with all the images of mutilated Hiroshima residents. Then the "story" starts, of a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) in town who has a one night stand with a Japanese man (Eiji Okada), and then they talk a whole bunch. She says "no" a lot, and he says "I want you to stay in Hiroshima." Oh yeah, like more than 3 times.


I will admit that this film has plenty of power, with beautiful and incredibly profound scenes but it's overshadowed by the fact that the whole thing is one big monologue. Both characters feel such compassion and their feelings are so complex and confusing, and yet they know exactly how to explain it. It's like they're both poets but the novelty wears thin after the first few minutes. I actually think this reminds me a lot of something Wong Kar-Wai would do. With the exception of the tedious and overlong dialogue, it's very much done in a similar tone of pacing. I really enjoyed the visuals though. Some of it is rather stagey, but it actually works. And the slow tracking shots in and out of subjects with the voice-over actually kind of reminded me of Terrence Malick (so maybe he was a Resnais fan).


The performances, in my opinion, really aren't that fantastic. There's a lot of over-acting, and Riva's flashback freak-outs are really annoying. All that being said, this is probably something that I will want to go back to eventually, 'cause like I said there are some great moments in it and it seems like a film that I might change my mind about at some point.