
Movie Memories: Last Year at Marienbad
This is a series of posts that serve as little diaries of my life told through movies that have distinct memories associated with their viewing. I don’t know how interesting they’ll be to anyone but myself.
I remember one of my first lectures in university: it was a 101 Art History class in an old theatre room. The professor was on stage while we all had comfortable seats in this deep hall. Early on, he showed a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound featuring a dream sequence with a ton of eyes that is cut by a giant pair of scissors like a cloth. The sequence was designed by Salvador Dali which I guess is why he was showing it. But what struck me was the amazement of seeing a classic black & white film in an actual theatre, actually projected and blasting through the speaker system. I naively thought it would be a real privilege to ever be able to see a real classic movie in this way. That such a thing was as extinct as dinosaurs. I had just moved to Toronto from Kingston where I worked at a Cineplex and we only screened the latest blockbusters. Old movies were found on TCM or the library.
After living in Toronto for a bit, I was brought along to the Toronto International Film Festival which blew me away. I had seen red carpet coverage of TIFF on TV when I lived in Kingston, never quite knowing what a film festival actually was but I knew someday I’d like to go. I learned that TIFF was building their own HQ in Toronto complete with several screens for year-round screenings. When the “Lightbox” as it was called was complete, I immediately visited to explore what it was and unknowingly found a new place that I would spend a great deal of time for the next ten-plus years.
Eventually, I became a TIFF member which meant I got some perks but also that I would have more reason to keep up with their programming. I started seeing many of those classic films in theatrical settings as I had once dreamed of to the point that it became commonplace. The experiences were just as fantastic as I had dreamed they might be. To see a classic Hitchcock the way it was intended to be seen is still an incredible and humbling experience. Each and every time. Eventually, I would see enough movies that I would sometimes go in with only reading a brief synopsis on the TIFF website. The results were naturally a mixed bag, some movies sucked me right in, others would be art films with hushed Italian voiceover that would put me into the most relaxed sleep of my life. But that’s part of the fun: everyone else was complaining about how trailers spoil too much of every movie and yet here is a theatre right downtown where you can see a movie you’ve never heard of and go in truly, completely blind.
So one day, while I was a freelance editor with intermittent work, I found myself with a Sunday to kill and thought, well I may as well see what’s playing at TIFF. They were screening a movie called Last Year at Marienbad which had only one showtime, lined up perfectly with my evening schedule and had a single image that was beautifully composed and just slightly surreal enough to peak my interest. So I got on my bike and headed over.
This is the type of movie that could go either way. I explained above sometimes a movie would draw me in and sometimes it would put me to sleep. Last Year at Marienbad is a movie that will do one or the other, guaranteed. And no one could be faulted for finding themselves on either end of that dichotomy. For me, on this afternoon, on this day, I was transfixed. This was something I had never seen before.
What was so incredible about the movie is that it is simultaneously complex and obtuse while being extremely simple and straightforward. Set in a luxury hotel of sorts, the primary characters have no names, only credited as “A”, “X”, and “M”. The “story” involves “X”, a man, trying to convince a beautiful woman, “A”, that they had met in Marienbad exactly a year prior and they had a life planned together. She refutes this, insisting they’ve never met. Her husband, “X”, intervenes as something of a crux in their dynamic. The film is a surrealist masterpiece where both space and time are in constant flux so you have no real way to gauge either. The baroque interiors of the hotel are stunning in high-contrast black & white and the exteriors are massive, but seemingly random as continuity seems deliberately “incorrect”. It creates a sort of dream-like world that explores how subjective memory is and how two versions of a story can both exist and be equally valid simultaneously. There are several seemingly random asides involving a card game I didn’t understand that further mess things up or add flavour to an already bizarre film.

What I found so refreshing is that for the first twenty or so minutes I immediately invested in my typical mindset of playing detective, trying to piece elements together and logically explain the film as is often the case. We are conditioned by filmmakers, professors, critics to assemble pieces of a story and “discover” what the true meaning is in conventionally challenging movies. I’ve come to realize it’s a bit of an ego game, both on the side of the filmmaker who uses obtuse imagery and language to make films that are elitist and incomprehensible to the average viewer, and especially on the side of critics and academics who spend a lot of energy deciphering signs and symbols, even in conventional movies, to show a deeper understanding or appreciation of a film. Sometimes this is valid, but I think more often than not it is a self-conscious “proving” of superiority in understanding cinema itself. It’s unsurprising many filmmakers deny the subtexts that academics come to agree on in many films. That’s not to say interpretation isn’t valid: I am not a person who thinks a filmmakers intent is the only way, or even the right way, to see a movie. Nor do I think that subtext is irrelevant or non-existent and that movies should be taken at face value. But, it’s always been a bit funny to me to see critics bemoan a movie for “giving away” a theme or subtext in dialogue or a visual metaphor as if it has robbed them of patronizing others who may have otherwise failed to grasp it. I lay a lot of blame at the feet of others, but I have to concede that human nature also draws us to make logical connections between symbols or clues, even when there are none.
So, the beautiful thing about Marienbad is that after 20 or 30 minutes of trying to analyze and make sense of something inherently illogical, I just surrendered. And the moment I did that, a huge relief and appreciation washed over me. Never before, and rarely since, have I seen a movie so open to interpretation and so subjective to each individual viewer. The lack of outside influences means that each character has an equally valid perspective, there is nothing in the film to tip the truth in one way or the other. I felt at the time that each viewer in the theatre might walk out and have a completely different interpretation of what happened and what it meant and they would all be equally valid. That was unique and powerful to me. The closest film I’ve seen to achieving that since is probably Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. There is no way to be wrong, no way to be right. Hell, even the director Alain Resnais and the writer Alain Robbe-Grillet fought and disagreed over the interpretation and intent of the script and film. If the architects behind the film can’t agree on what it means, then it has no meaning. Which is not to say it is meaningless. It’s the opposite: it opens the door to personal interpretation without the burden of an accepted or official version. I continue to find that very powerful and it is one of the rare cases of a feature film approaching the way painting or music can be absorbed and expressed by the people who appreciate it.
When I left Marienbad, watching it alone at the Lightbox, I decided to walk home rather than bike and just sort of enjoyed the evening energy of the city. It was very peaceful and memorable. The film immediately became one of the most important movies to me, personally. I bought the Criterion Blu-ray shortly before it went out-of-print but still, to this day, have never dared to watch it. As I said earlier, this movie may enthral you or bore you to tears and its impact on me on that one single screening is so fragile that I am terrified that viewing it on a TV in a living room with a million distractions would steal that value from me. Some day I might watch it again, but sometimes something only has to be seen once, and then live in the vault of your memories where it improves with age as your memory sands off the edges and leaves only the pleasant feeling it left you with. Few movies can give you that feeling to begin with, so when one succeeds, it’s worth cherishing.
