Last Year at Marienbad

Watching Last Year at Marienbad is like trying to figure out how to win the game that M always wins. Alain Resnais’s film takes away linear storytelling, conventional editing, character names, and our sense of fictional/reality in the world of the film. As frustrating as it is to watch and keep track of everything, I cannot stop playing the game. I cannot stop myself from trying to decipher the memory from the reality. Nor can I stop myself from appreciating the way Resnais offers the variety of ways of showing memory.

Sometimes we remember events in bright spurts like in the bar scene as A “remembers” a moment that has been whitewashed in her mind. Even though flashing scenes as a person suddenly remembers is a convention of modern filmmaking, the high contrast between the black “real” world and the white “memory” world feels innovative. But sometimes we remember by repetition. As Resnais illustrates in the scene in which X tells A when they were in the bedroom yet showing them outside, if we repeatedly remember the wrong thing, then we have created a false memory that does not reflect what truly happened. Sometimes we recall moments in our lives as a performance as the opening scene demonstrates. People play their roles in our lives though sometimes we do not accurately remember what their roles were in reality. M starts off as a random hotel guest but as the film progresses he becomes A’s husband.

So what really happened to X and A? Are they even real people or a figment of someone's imagination? Even trying to watch the film a second time, I did not win. Resnais always wins by showing us how we play with our own minds to remember what we want to remember.