Word: marienbad
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...Adieu to Alain Robbe-Grillet, 85, a founding father of the postwar nouveau roman movement who wrote the script for Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, that ultra-chic chess game of adultery and fabulous frocks. Robbe-Grillet then channel much of his energy into filmmaking, with such kinky mystifiers as Trans-Europ Express, The Man Who Lies and the cunningly titled Progressive Slidings of Pleasure. Simon Gray, 71, wrote for the stage (where many of his tart, smart comedies were directed by Pinter) and stayed there. Fortunately, his best play, Butley, is preserved on film, along with Alan Bates...
...Something similar might be said of the more aspiring Private Fears in Public Places, an unlikely adaptation by Alain Resnais, once the master of such high art revels as Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, of a play by Alan Ayckbourn, a farceur who has always loved, sometimes to excess, the intricate braiding of characters and story lines. Everything in this movie seems to have been made on a soundstage and, for reasons best known to the director, his Paris is caught in a perpetual blizzard; it goes on for the several days consumed by the plot...
...excellence. To be cinematically literate - "cinemate," to borrow a term Time proposed in a 1963 cover story heralding the first New York Film Festival - one had to be able to discuss the hidden narrative meanings and formal innovations of pictures like The Seventh Seal and Last Year at Marienbad. Foreign films had snob appeal and sex appeal. Or they did until American movies, over a few years in the 60s, discovered daring. Audiences were titillated and relieved. They could still feel superior but no longer had to read subtitles...
...allure of foreign-language films was twofold: they had class and they had sex. Ritzy Manhattan soirees were spiced with debates about what was real and what fantasy in Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad or Fellini's 8 1/2, about Antonioni's seductive use of existential ennui. And when foreign films didn't tax the brain, they stirred the loins. In pouty Brigitte Bardot, in statuesque peasant Sophia Loren, in the knowing rapture of Jeanne Moreau, Americans saw ideals of glamour more complex than Jayne Mansfield. Even Bergman gave you bosoms along with the angst. These films were invitations...
Wetherby revives an ancient pleasure: the need to think while watching a movie. One could almost be back in the 1960s, when films like Last Year at Marienbad demanded to be approached like cryptic crosswords. For upwards of two hours we stretch our intellects to find the key to Wetherby's emotional life. The film's characters do not easily yield to analysis, though they are surely worth the bother. Their stiff upper lips are pursed in ruminative silence. And when they speak, they have something to say; Wetherby is a devilishly clever talk show. Moreover, they inhabit a film...