Last Year at Marienbad - the Easter Party Game

Nothing spells meta like having a Last Year at Marienbad party for Easter. When San Moritz is beckoning and all you can afford is a rental of one of the most pretentious and bourgeois art movies ever made, and maybe the best, or worst, and both, certainly... maybe. Where were we? Touches like a voiceover that slowly fades underneath booming organ tones as it speaks of wandering through an "edifice of a bygone era," with carpets thick and ornate mirrors and windows that reflect "galleries, side corridors that in turn lead to an empty room... a silent room where one's footsteps are absorbed by carpets so thick and heavy that they reach no one's ear. Repeat.

Watching it now, in the 21st century, it's hard to know if stark black-and-white perfume and jewelry ads with sad-eyed women lounging by long obelisk-shaped pools, or beds (or were they shrubs?), surrounded by wealth... if MARIENBAD launched them all. In case you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's from 1961 and directed by Alain Resnais and written by S/M intellectual Alain Robbe-Grillet. It is about a girl in a gorgeous black feather dress (ala Dietrich in Shanghai Express) who may or may not have had an affair or been sexually assaulted the year before by some sleazy, dead-in-the-eyes lothario at a similar hotel in Marienbad. This creep never stops lingering over her with sick, dead smile. He makes Boris Karloff look like Clark Gable. This scenario is played out over and over again, with the same cryptic narration about the hotel, shadows that switch sides and disappear in the lovely garden, and a bunch of people either sitting or standing by a row of chairs.

Oh and there's a memory of a snowbound chalet, which may or may not be just the painting hanging in the girl's hotel room, or the girl might be hanging in the snowbound chalet, with a picture of Marienbad on the wall. If the setting of the film is in Marienbad or meant to be just a memory, who can say. According to Wiki it was filmed in several different chateaus to "produce a disorienting effect." And Coco Chanel made Seyrig's gowns! They're sleek, but shot cold as a diamond in a freezer.

I concocted the following idea while trying to watch the film several times and realizing it worked best watching random chapters over a period of a week. In 15 minute intervals, at random, it's a masterwork. For more than 15 minutes, it's infuriating and worst of all, pretentious. The actors don't mesmerize, and when narrative is this thoroughly deconstructed, they must. Once constant narrative frustration gets on your nerves in Godard, you can just stare into the celestial beauty of a female face, but as pretty as Delphine Seyrig is, as lovely as her Dietrich-ish gowns are, she really doesn't project the same goddess magnitude of, say, Monica Vitti or Bibbi Anderson, or Anna Karina. Imagine how dull L'AVENTURA, RED DESERT, PERSONA or MY LIFE TO LIVE would be without the beauty and emotional spontaneity and realness in the starlet's faces. They're there for a reason. We don't have anything else to hold us to the screen.

It's not Seyrig's fault that she doesn't connect and seems trapped in a kind of cold bourgeois first class duty free French Vogue hell, one of fine gowns, suffocating over-ornamentation, endless shots of ornate hallways, figures frozen in cocktail repose, a reptilian suitor and cadaver-like husband, an auteur and writer who are so rigorously intellectual and formal they pin Seyrig like an etherized butterfly to the deathly vacant space. Empty past gestures are discussed over and over as if they one day will have meaning. And the organ music grates like a list of grievances on a loop... and every head of hair is slicked back to the point of cruelty. Empty corridors as far as the eye can see will eventually bore even the most hardened European intellectual (my Argentine ex-wife, a leftist-intellectual film maker who introduced me to Bunuel and Godard, called MARIENBAD the most pretentious piece of shit ever made.)

If you find the film's repetitious nonlinear, fractal-like structure is frustrating over a long haul... may I suggest the MARIENBAD the party game? Here is what you need:

* At least two other people to watch the movie with, ideally if you're in a love triangle with them (invite the pretty person you like, and the less attractive one who likes you, and who will definitely come and pretend to like the film as long as you say it's great).
* 3-7 chairs, ideally straight-backed dining room table style, arranged in a semi-circle in front of the TV screen.
* One large framed painting or picture of a winter landscape, ideally with a small house in it.
* A book of kitchen matches and a coffee table (or card table)

There is a lot of mirroring and refracting in the film, and the idea for the game is to represent a mirror to the action onscreen, but an 'off' surrealist mirror. So when all the men are standing you sit and unfreeze when they freeze and mimic their movements when they look in the mirror. Let's say Daphne hangs up the winter landscape painting on her wall in the movie, you would then take the painting out of the room. When she takes it off the wall and hides it, you would bring it out and hang yours up, evoking the meta idea she's passing the painting through the mirror/screen to you. When the men play that weird match game, you play too, and when the chairs are empty onscreen, you sit in them, and vice versa.

When that gets old, watch the film; when the film gets old, play the game. Once you get in the habit, you should find yourself naturally going with the flow of the action, going to the bathroom as a character enters the screen, and vice versa, and you can get that post-modern affect high, and avoid being too bored by the film itself. If you leave to go to the bathroom or kitchen for god's sake don't pause it. You can be certain whatever you missed will be refracted and repeated. 

If that gets dull you can start in the middle, or pick a random chapter, or watch the same chapter ten times instead of the whole film once. Keep the game going and you just may find yourself in San Moritz, or Marienbad, as the hellish simulacrum comes crashing down and Christ rises like a star of the real in your heaven.

Last year at Marien...something something

"This shows how far we are incapable of looking at (I wont even say understanding) an incident without interpreting it and without our look added to the amalgam, a mixture which by nature belongs as much to the documentary image as it does to the fiction with which we envelop it." - Andre S. Labarthe (Cahiers du Cinema, Sept. 1961)

"Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" - Chico

Everyone has their own take on the formally modern jigsaw puzzle that is Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), soon to be released on a beautiful DVD by Criterion. Is it the story of a repressed memory of possible sexual assault? Or is it just a collection of images that Resnais relies upon the viewer to make sense of? Or is it just...bad? As in the old "Le Bad Cinema" from SNL? Me, I've seen it a few times, but I never saw it the first time. I still need to see it for the first time. Does that make sense?

It shouldn't. It's a snapshot of hell: the audience plays its own part as stuck in a staid inferno of pretentious wankery; the characters are in a hell of art, located in the center of a pyramid bordered by Carnival of Souls (1962), the Shining (1980), and Jess Franco's Succubus (1968)--all three of which seem--at some level--influenced by Marienbad and for this writer at least, all three help situate the Marienbad experience. The hotel is located in a film screen, an architectural macro-micro fracture encumbered by the duty-free shop bourgeoisie claustrophobic jewels and gilded edges of Max Ophuls. If the final party scene in L'Aventura caught a slow motion flu and it took three years for the sun to come up, well, as long as there weren't any circus performers sulking through the still corridors like in Bergman's The Silence, what could it matter? Time and memory are mercifully ever in a state of mutual eclipse, and its this that Resnais seems after. He wants to make a film so boring that time itself stands still around it, forcing the elliptical orbit of the following year's orbit to collide with its predecessor like two clones of the same empty room. 


It's all so influential there are even a few unofficial horror sequels, like: Daughters of Darkness (1971, pictured above) features an older Delphine Seyrig as an ageless vampire Bathory, still wandering the halls of a decaying empty (off season?) old European-style resort, but this time being the one who pulls the "I've always known you" gaslight on the sweet young thing of a possessive scumbag; Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) offers similar editing schemes (such as the justly famous sex/dressing afterwards montage), a similarly desolate grand hotel and a similar "you were here before" gaslight, this time worked on the man (Donald Sutherland) by two batty psychic sisters. Both films operate on at least a few of Marienbad's ghostly frequencies--particularly the "living corpse" analogies and the possibly supernatural origins of the female protagonists' husband or "keeper." Don't Look Now, Succubus and The Shining actually only begin to get enjoyable with the second or third viewing. With Marienbad, Resnais makes sure to show us the film several times all at once, so we can get over that hurtle and really enjoy it, which is to perhaps come to the realization that we have never actually enjoyed it, or even seen it... again.

The first time through is fairly taxing, but by the second you've prepared counter-expectations. In modernist form ab abstractum tediorous, one longs for some circus freaks to parade by, ala Bergman or Fellini, just to liven things up, but this film is totally static and clownless. (wait, didn't I just say I was glad it was clownless?) It's instead the nucleus for all the aforementioned horror movies to rotate around, gaining meaning and resonance with every revolution, presumably. Ultimately it's about the impossibility of memory and perception, with every image reflected and refracted into oblivion, and Seyrig as the ultimate vampire queen at the center. The one person who provides the illusion of a soul, of depth behind the facile masks, is the one person who is, in fact, completely soulless, and why isn't she a blonde? That, at least, would make sense. 

It's the hell of the endless party out of time, where Candace Hilligoss (left), Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland, and Janine Reynaud all end up; hell is not after all a land without enjoyment, but a land where enjoyment is never allowed to cease... as in the old Disney cartoon of Satan's helpers force-feeding naughty children on conveyor belts. Instead of sweets it's the over-cooked trappings of the bourgeoisie that are inescapable here, the way an American child who doesn't understand witty banter might feel being dragged to a French film without subtitles--the decaying crumbling land where perfume ads really do come true, and once inside you can never escape. As with Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais uses repetition of imbecilic phrases over and over to make some kind of post-hypnotic point and like Hiroshima Mon Amour it's damned irritating to anyone not easily enthralled by a strain of modern art that takes itself too seriously, that hasn't pre-empted hoots and hollers from the back row by having a stooge wandering through occasionally slipping on a banana peel. Godard's satiric edge and short attention span saves his films from the abyss where Resnais doesn't fear to plummet.

That the picture on the Criterion disc is so beautiful and pristine is probably not entirely positive as it leaves no room for improvement: One might look at an old crappy Koch Lorber disc and think, "Well, perhaps if the picture were better, it would be a kind of work of art," but with Criterion's beautiful disc, there's no longer room for doubt.

As Seyrig puts so eloquently, "I don't know that room, that silly bed, that fireplace with the mirror. There's no mirror over the fireplace. It's a painting."

 Oui, mademoiselle, at's a no painting, at's a spinach.

This movie is what might have happened, in other words, if there never were a Marx Brothers. They, at least, knew how to deal with these types of posturing pretentious dullards and dealt with them they did, as far back in 1930's Animal Crackers and their continued fuss over the missing Bogarde original oil painting, which is tossed around like an old table cloth. I kept wishing Groucho Marx would inhabit Seyrig's body and do his "strange interlude" impression from that film: "How happy I could be with either of these two... if both of them just went away." I kept hoping Chico would run up and ask someone to play bridge. But the Chico, he never a-comes: that's my nightmare, that's my hell, crawling across a straight razor. There's nothing wrong with that if it works.

What does Marienbad mean? Whatever it means, it's meaning it now.

The shattered glass effect is also one of the process of filmmaking itself, which involves watching the same scenes over and over, different takes, different edits, all shot out of sequence. Some of the jump edits here in Marienbad are sizzlingly witty (characters stare at each other across years and rooms and hair and time) but some are just headache inducing --the artsy version of a kid flicking the light switch on and off really fast to annoy his older sister. Alain Resnais, quit it this instant and go to your room!


The rationale here of course is that Resnais is just being French and focusing on French cinema and architecture rather than delving into American pop iconography with the kid in a candy store glee of the famous Godard. The modern salts in the Marienbath have no American counterweight. They are purely French in the way that makes Yankee tourists in Paris feel slighted; they have the pretentiousness without the naturally self-effacing wit which the French don't even realize lies inherent in the sing-song expression of their language. The completely self-serious bourgeois posturing in Marienbad is something we in America are only used to seeing from behind velvet ropes or through the jaundiced eyes of Billy Wilder, the stuff that makes the henpecked husband roll his eyes while his matronly wife applauds, politely, gloved and holding her opera glasses. It's a representation of a bourgeois snob stereotype we in America have been trained from our Max Sennett birth to deal with by either a) throwing pies; b) sending a Barrymore up to steal their jewels; or c) showing them the error of their ways through a moving speech on a roof, podium, or barstool.

Alas, left to their own devices, the ennui-ridden ghosts of Marienbad and their sordid modernist loops of romantic betrayal are un-signifiable. They are inherently obscurantist. They are for someone else to like, someone who actually reads Gertrude Stein instead of just carrying the book around Washington Square Park trying to seem deep. Marienbad cries to be adapted by a modernist multi-media troupe like NYC's Wooster Group, with three different video screens alongside a bawdy vaudeville show. I'd go. Twice, and be secretly bored each time, though twenty years later I'd boast about it. Did you know I saw the Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones--with the amazing Kate Valk in blackface drag and dressed as a samurai back in 1995? It's true, matey. And let me tell you one thing I learned from art school: just because a film is so boring it makes you get up, leave your seat and go to the bathroom and then go to have a cigarette outside and then not come back doesn't mean it was bad. It only means it's modern. Forget it Jake, it's Marienbad!