Yesterday I rewatched one of my all time favorite movies, the awesome French art film Last Year at Marienbad. I’ve seen this flick about a dozen times now, including the six or seven times that I watched it during the summer of 2000, when my obsession with French cinema was at it’s peak.
I didn’t understand it, thank goodness. One of my great fears is that I’ll someday watch this movie and actually get it. I don’t want to ruin the viewing experience.
Rather than torture readers with an amateur’s review of a purposely incomprehensible movie, I’ll just quote here the great Jonathan Rosenbaum:
“A highly seductive parable about seduction, it’s set in and around a baroque European chateau/hotel, where the nameless hero (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to persuade the nameless heroine (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year. Shot by Sacha Vierny in otherworldly black-and-white ‘Scope, it oscillates ambiguously between past, present, and various conditional tenses, mixing memory and fantasy, fear and desire. The overall tone is poker-faced parody of lush Hollywood melodrama, yet the film’s dreamlike cadences, frozen tableaux, and distilled surrealist poetry are too eerie, too terrifying even, to be shaken off as camp. For all its notoriety, this masterpiece among masterpieces has never really received its due.”
I love movies like Marienbad, where the environment is so overwhelming that it becomes a protagonist in it’s own right. To be honest, this time I found myself halfway through the viewing not even caring about the characters. They were just window dressing for the glorious hotel and Vierny’s masterful cinematography.
I was lucky to have come of age in the nineties. My generation was blessed with a ton of great live action movies of this type. We had Dark City, Dead Man, Babe: Pig in the City, and many other, similar movies.
Today’s big budget visual movies tend to be spastic and a little too action oriented, I think. I prefer movies that are a bit slower- movies in which you can really sink into the environment and become a part of it.
You know, I should get back into watching movies regardless. I stopped watching them almost altogether about 7 years ago, once it became obvious that they would watch me back(!), but I’m not caring about that as much as I used to. Plus, the movies I’m most interested in seeing now are the ones I can watch in peace anyways.
I’ve never seen Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Lang’s M, Chaplin’s City Lights, Ulmer’s Detour, Fuller’s Shock Corridor, or… a few hundred other movies that I swore to myself I would watch at least once.
No time like the present, though- especially now! C’ est magnifique!