Screenwriter: Alain Rob-Grillet
Starring: Delphine Selig, Giorgio Albertaki, Sacha Pitoff
Genre: Drama / Romance
Release Date: 1961 June 25, 2009
Duration: 94 minutes
Ratio: 2.35 : 1
Production: Cocinor
"Now you are getting lost, in this quiet night, alone follow me and lose your way forever."
As the French New Wave "Left Bank" The representative film of the giant Aaron Resnais was honored to watch this "master work" at the Shanghai International Film Festival this year. For audiences generally unfamiliar with "surrealism", the narration of complete stream of consciousness, the sometimes still characters, the closed space environment, the slow traversing shots, and the somewhat illogical editing of the shots make this film. The movie irretrievably became a hypnotizing masterpiece for theaters.
But in fact, "Last Year in Marienbad" can be said to make full use of film means to express the visual stream of consciousness in the human brain. The film itself does not pay attention to its story, but expresses some symbolic elements in an artistic way by borrowing scenes and characters. For example, the three most important characters in the movie are named with A, X, and M respectively, as well as the recurring Nim cards, shooting game scenes, etc. The "Marion Budd" in the title is more of a fictitious place name. You can say that he exists, but aside from the language of the film, it is indeed a hard fiction. Only in Marienbad can such a story happen. For the protagonist in the story, in a sense, it is like a "utopian" existence, which is completely based on the narration of the male protagonist X. an unverifiable "reality" that arises. In my opinion, the male protagonist X is a mysterious character. He has always used poetic language to make the female protagonist A have a certain "obscenity" reality. If X represents men's desire to conquer women, then A is the irresistible temptation of dreams for women. M, on the other hand, is always a calm and unmoved observer.
It is worth mentioning that the picture of the film is very delicate, the scene in the film is a hotel built in a French garden, there are no trees and no flowers. Straight lines and boxy spaces are like the paintings of Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte. A and X enter the garden and lose themselves in the garden. The baroque decoration of the hotel, as well as the silent and dormant statues, have the luxury and gloom of a bygone era. The art director of this film is Jacques Saulnier, who has collaborated with Alain Resnais for many times. His scenography works in the 1971 film "Cat" (Le chat) and "French Chanson" (1997). In addition, the heroine Dephine Seliger's exquisite costumes in the film are also eye-catching. Even in the black and white picture, the neon clothes in the light and shadow are not inferior in the slightest, and the heroine's elegant and noble, glamorous and moving image is vividly set off, and it has become one of the classic styles in fashion movies. The black dress and the layered pearl necklace in the film are like Chanel style, and the white feather dress, light organza cape skirt and black lace dress at the end of the film are all from the hands of Bernard Evein, who also worked with Bernard Evein. Jacques Demy has collaborated in films such as "The Umbrella of Cherbourg" and "Lola".
Alain Resnais and the screenwriter Alain Rob-Grillet originally intended to pay tribute to the French surrealist poet Andre Breton, but he did not give a positive comment after watching the film. But when the film was officially released in 1961, it received a huge response, and won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival that year, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Screenplay. So watching "Marianbad" became a trend at that time. Bergman, Fellini, and Kubrick were all influenced by it. I don't know if Wes Anderson has also been inspired by it. At 00:33:05 and 00:18:21, we can see the origin of the symmetrical composition of "The Grand Budapest Hotel".
The caption for this article is X's narration at the end of the film. As Alain Robe-Grillet said: "There's really nothing that last year, and Marionba wasn't on the map. But when the past prevails, the past becomes the present." And the only thing we can do is Lose yourself in a surreal garden.
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