Last Year at Marienbad (DVD)

Synopsis

"One of the year's Ten Best Films!"

A formally astonishing and narratively audacious film, one that plays with time and memory, suggesting how little can be known with certainty. In a baroque and spacious hotel, a man sees a woman and believes that he knows her from the year before -- except, as the film jumps from time to time, events keep repeating and altering slightly, making the entire world unstable and recollection undependable. What is real and what is imagination... and is anything true?

Winner of the Grand Prize Award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD [L'année dernière à Marienbad from France] is a seductive tale of the idle rich, set at a lavish European spa.

A handsome stranger tries to convince a lovely young woman that they had a passionate affair a year ago "perhaps at Marienbad," but she claims not to remember him. He haunts her mind with images by mixing memory and fantasy, fear and desire. Last Year at Marienbad, considered one of the most controversial films ever made, has forever changed ideas regarding what cinema is about and what it can do.

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, 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-filled 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.