ORIGINAL TITLE
L’Année dernière à Marienbad
1961
DIRECTOR
Alain Resnais
SCREENPLAY
Alain Robbe-Grillet
PRODUCTION
Pierre Courau, Raymond Froment
DURATION
94 minutes
COUNTRY
France
CAST
Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff
DCP
Original French version with Italian and English subtitles
PLOT
A 1961 collaboration between the cinematic and literary French New Waves; director Alain Resnais’s gorgeous and bewitching black and white film – written by Alain Robbe-Grillet – is a commentary on the hypnotic and elusive nature of life and love as a series of hallways and rooms. In a huge, beautiful, and desolate hotel, a man tries to get a married woman to run off with him by telling her the affair they may – or may not – have had. Its visual stylization alone makes Last year at Marienbad one of the most influential of all time. “It plays with film in the same ways that Borges plays with literature. Every time I see it, it feels entirely different to me; I can’t think of many films like that”, Iñárritu reflects. “It’s almost like I never really got it, and I don’t think I want to”.