Last Year At Marienbed

Last Year At Marienbed (1961), directed by Alain Resnais (who recently passed away in 2014) and written by respected novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, is an infamous modern film. I think that the cinematic quality of the film should be undeniable: gorgeous black and white cinematography at a beautiful hotel and its grounds with gorgeous people dressed to the nines in artist arrangements with exquisite framing and tracking shots. But I can see how this film also represents the incomprehensibility and pretentiousness of Europeans films and can be used as a model for these complaints. Notoriously, this film was one of Pauline Kael's targets in her seminal essay, "The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties." There is something of a bare bones plot in which X (Giorgio Albertazzi) narrates the film in which he may or may not have met A (Delphine Sevrig) last year and promised to meet again this year. However, she has some sort of connection with M (Sacha Pitoeff), who acts as antagonist to X and has a hold on A. The plot is convoluted as it is not presented in naturalistic fashion so it becomes convoluted. It is a supreme art house film which I think would have limited appeal to the average film goer. But for cinemaphiles it marks a milestone in innovation of sorts in movie making-challenging the viewer in new ways.