Word: marienbad
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...match game, in which the first player doesn't seem to have a chance, one of the more comprehensible features of the new French movie, Last Year at Marienbad (see MODERN LIVING...
Last Year at Marienbad (Astor), written by Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the prophet of The New Dehumanism that is currently fashionable in French letters, and directed by Alain Resnais, the 39-year-old Frenchman who made Hiroshima, Mon Amour (TIME, May 16, 1960), has been bruited about Europe as a masterpiece of the cinema of ideas. It won the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival, and went on to do a brisk business all over the continent. Released now in the U.S., it promises to become the intellectual sensation of the cinema year, and to judge from pre-release...
...Marienbad is not a movie in the publicly accepted sense of the word; it is an enigma, the most monstrously elaborate enigma ever conceived in terms of cinema...
...face of it, Marienbad tells the story of a seduction-Resnais prefers to call it a "persuasion"-that transpires in what Robbe-Grillet calls "a grand hotel, a sort of international palace, immense, baroque, with a decor at once sumptuous and icy: a universe of columns, marbles, gilded panels, statues, servants in rigid attitudes; a clientele rich, polished, anonymous, unemployed. Seriously but without passion they play society's inevitable games-cards, dancing, vacant conversation, pistol-shooting. Inside this closed and stifling world, people and things alike seem caught in an enchantment.'' Among the enchanted inhabitants...
...begins, the seducer with seeming sincerity reminds the young woman that they have met before. With seeming sincerity she says she cannot remember when. Why, it was only a year ago, he says reproachfully, and at this very same spa-or was it at Friedrichsbad? Or was it at Marienbad? Wherever it was, they met and-can she really have forgotten?-fell in love. She says he must be joking. He insists he isn't, and begins to remind her of things he says they said, things he says they did. She can't remember the events...