Last year in Marienbad (1961)

Director Alain Resnais, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet with Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi (DVD)

Perhaps if I’d been in the mood . . .

As it was, the film’s stylised, enigmatic repetitiveness and affectless delivery had my eyelids drooping before an hour had passed. The deliberate unsettling of the viewer: words and images not matching, or the heavy organ music over the scene of a violin duet. The constant references to frozenness and marble and the actors who seem to be playing a never-ending game of Statues. It’s the first time I’ve watched a DVD and checked how much longer it lasts for. I’m not sure even now what it was about; I’ll check when I’ve written this and see how wide of the mark I am.

Perhaps it was a ghost story or a study in alienation. The unreliability of memory, the im/permanence of love, the multiplicity of interpretations of a single event or statue. Shall I drag up epistemology? Maybe a satire on the idle rich and their fossilised splendour. Should I see it through a feminist lens? I’ve been following that one through: the straight, upright male, insisting that his version of events in the true one; the female figure forever seen in a contrapposto Madonna pose or entwined in her own protective arms like Andromeda or some other threatened female character. Set in a rigidly geometric set – whether the endless corridors or over-formal gardens, where characters are like pieces on a chessboard. Even that theory doesn’t quite stand up: what to make of the husband who always wins at his game and is very definite about what the ambiguous statue represents? And male nouvelle vague directors weren’t renowned for their feminist take, were they?

Perhaps after all it is a ghost story – one where the ghosts are doomed to repeat themselves for eternity like Sisyphus or the narrator of “The Third Policeman”.

And my bewildered readings of the film – do they have any validity if they diverge so far from the director’s intentions all those years ago? 

Am I bothered?