Cheap Last Year at Marienbad (DVD) (Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff) (Alain Resnais) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Last Year at Marienbad

What I want people to think about this movie is, what if it was made in caves, featuring short, fat, dumpy, pimply people in loin cloths and hyena hydes?

I, therefore, am waiting for the remake. In the meantime, we can all turn on to robbe-grillet's world (he's written novels, essays, also.) Don't go another moment without this prophetic revelation of what we call today the "false memory syndrome" issue. Modern madness never looked so good. It's a dream affixed to silicon/ mylar, frozen in time and space forever.

Lynch could never be so subtle. Kubrick would blush to be so personal. Antonioni gives us too much of an intelligent view of reality to be so dreamy. Fellini gives us too much of an intelligent view of dreams to be so realistic.

And all of humanity, loving it or hating it, may never guess it for what it is: a subtle mirror that reflects and includes its audience simultaneously, so effectively no one notices. It is an inclusive mirror of a world all dressed up with no place to go.

Don't think, Just Look.
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is virtually without peer in the cinema. It has caused a great deal of controversy over the years, with some claiming it as one of the greatest films ever made, others claiming that it must be some sort French joke on the audience. For those of you familiar with French films in general, you know that bad French movies tend to consist of a few characters discoursing about love in a stilted, soap-opera-like manner. Set against this context, LYAM is indeed a joke, a brilliant satire. The banality of the love triangle also pokes very Gallic fun at the annoying cliches of Hollywood melodrama. Part of the confusion caused by this film comes from the standard nature of the plot - our expectations about how this type of film should work are constantly set up, then thouroughly compromised from the opening sequence of the movie. Viewers are rarely cognizant of just how much we have internalized standard Hollywood techniques as the ONLY way of using cinematic forms to tell a story, which should have a beginning, middle and end, but MARIENBAD cannot be understood this way, although there is indeed a progression to this bizarre narrative, which takes the form of Man Y's increasingly elaborate explanations of what might have happened between him and the Woman in her room, which might have been either rape or seduction. It is a profoundly VISUAL film that can only be understood if you use your eyes carefully. The action is split completely from the dialogue, which goes over the same issues again and again in settings that indicate different times of day and of the year. Some of these scenes are flashbacks, some may only be the narrator's fantasy. In MARIENBAD, past, present and future coexist simultaneously. What MARIENBAD dramatizes is the relative quality of human memory. We tend to organize our perceptions of the world in linear fashion, but memory is non-linear, collapsing past and present into a single entity. Subjectivity is crucial to understanding MARIENBAD, which examines the way in which each participant in a given event experiences the same event differently. Lawyers know that if you have six different eywitnesses to an event, you will get six different stories about what happened, and this relativity of memory is basically what MARIENBAD is about. Once you know this, MARIENBAD is actually quite easy to understand and to follow, at least in terms of the "plot." Now just sit back and admire the unbelievably rich technique the film uses to explore this idea. The moving camera tracks by frozen humans, assimilating them within the overall decor, are combined with astonishing editing techniques which alternately slow down or extend time itself through fragmentation or repetition. The performances (and the actors REALLY ARE BRILLIANT - I can hardly imagine how difficult this film must have been to act) accomplish the same thing through similar means. This film should be watched at least 3 times, once just to accustom yourself to its unique rhythms, a second to appreciate the complex structure, and a third for the humour of it. MARIENBAD is a truly mind-boggling experience.

ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.........
The most tedious film I've ever seen. I had to watch it in film school and I nearly went out of my mind with boredom. VERY hard to sit through. You keep waiting for a story to emerge and it just never does. I suspect that the whole thing might have been a grand joke on the part of the director ... make a nonsense "art" film and see what significance his audience reads into it!!