Note: Last year in Marienbad is playing at the Film Forum in NYC through January 31. This article contains spoilers: consider yourself warned if you have not watched the movie but you are planning to do so.
The “story”
A (Delphine Seyrig), accompanied by M (Sacha Pitoëff), who may or may not be her husband, and X (Giorgio Albertazzi), whom she may or may not have seen before, meet at an opulent European hotel that may or may not exist.
– Howard Schumann, CineScene
The title of the movie specifies a time (last year) and a place (Marienbad). Yet, in the movie time and space are never stable and never reliable. Did X and A meet last year? And if they did, was it in Marienbad? Or was it perhaps in Fredericksburg, or Baden-Salsa? Are we seeing the present or the past?
The movie shows us fragments; scenes and dialogs repeat but they are never quite the same. What is real? We see people, but also mirror reflections, flashes of memories (perhaps), and actors in a play. At the same time, every word uttered in the movie is obsessively referring to the same one story.
Like the best of the avant-garde, it seems important yet one is at a loss to truly understand what it is about. Like a small handful of films and stories, it defies comprehension yet still has enough meaning to allow each viewer to conclude for himself what it may be about.
– Filethirteen.com
In traditional movies we have the reassuring certainty that, in the end, all will be revealed: every piece and lose end will magically fall into place into one, logical picture. All the discomfort and unbalance we felt while watching the movie or following the story (the very reason we stuck with it until the end) will transmute in a moment of exhilarating satisfaction: yes, it all makes sense now!
Don’t expect this to happen in Marienbad.
At the beginning, we behave like normal movie viewers. We try to figure out what’s going on (did X and A meet last year? Is M A’s husband? is X trying to hurt or save A?). By the end we realize that understanding what happened or did not happen is irrelevant.
The structure
Marienbad forces our attention away from content and towards structure. As in the game of Misère Nim (see also), one of the recurring themes in the movie, what counts is not the identity of each piece, but their organization and the rules of the game (Nim is played several times during the movie: first with cards, then with toothpicks, matches, poker chips, and domino pieces; Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay also shows A arranging rose petals in the same 7-5-3-1 scheme).
According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence — the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up.
The Oscar site
Towards the end of the movie, X explicitly refers to M as the person who may or may not be A’s husband. We get annoyed. We realize that there is no story to discover. There is no truth. The characters don’t know more than we do about themselves or the events they incessantly discuss. A doesn’t know if she ever met X, if X is somebody she should trust or run away from, or if M is or is not her husband.
What you see is what you get.
The specific identity of characters and events is not as important as the mathematical relationships between them. Characters and events are not trying to convince us they are real. They are presented as archetypes of characters and events: a formal narrative structure that applies to many stories.
[If Marienbad were a shape, it would be a triangle. The story is about a character triangle (not quite a “love” triangle). The Nim game is based on a triangular structure of pieces. The prospective view of the garden as well as the stylized shrubs show a series of repeating triangles. Triangles are as rigid and unforgiving and the atmosphere throughout the movie.]
The meaning
Perhaps the ultimate puzzle film, with dizzying time shifts and flashbacks, real or imagined—or are they shifts into the subjunctive? Possible solutions have included the Orpheus-Eurydice myth; a visualization of the process of psychoanalysis; or the whole as a kind of stream-of-consciousness of a single mind, encompassing truth, lies, and visualized whatifs.
The Reeler
There is no limit to the interpretations of this narrative structure:
- Marienbad represents the making of a movie, or any art creation from the characters point of view. There are many repetitions and reshootings. The story changes in the course of the production. The characters don’t know nor can choose what is true or false about themselves and what their next move would be. Thy are trapped in a story structure that limits their motion and their destiny.
- From a Buddhist perspective, Marienbad is a representation of our limited mind trying to make sense of our life and what is happening to us by creating rigid and dualistic structures (the Self, the Truth, the unidirectionality of time). Eventually, we’ll learn that there is no self, there is no truth, and reality is fluid and contradictory. In our path of liberation, we will get rid of the rigidity of habits and repetitions and find our way towards the pure freedom of seeing things as they are, in all their uncertainty and contradiction.
- This movie is about death and our fear of death. A tries to delay as long as she can the inevitable end, when she has to leave her trapped but reassuring reality and follow X towards the unknown.
And so on.
The accidental spectator
For me, the film represents an attempt, still crude and primitive, to approach the complexity of thought and of its mechanisms. I have found that in each descent into the unconscious an emotion is born.
– Alain Resnais
In art, sense and meaning are created by the interaction between the object and the viewer. Is the Monna Lisa art if nobody is looking at it? Art exists in the encounter between an object and a creator of meaning.
As in a very complicated and multi-level cloud, each of us can see different things in a painting o art installation. Yet, art is realized not in the content of our interpretation, but in the process of connecting and finding meaning.
In commercial movies we are passive spectators of something happening in front of us; we are puppets whose reactions and emotions are manipulated by the director puppet master. We become voyeurs waiting to learn what somebody else has already figured out for us.
Marienbad irritates us because it’s an unforgiving representation of passive consumption. Marienbad infuriates us because, without warning, forces us to be as creative as the director and writer themselves: we have to create the meaning that is hidden (or we perceive hidden) in the scenes, dialog, locations, brightness contrasts, geometric compositions, dynamics.
We feel cheated by the effort required. I’s hard. It’s boring. It isn’t satisfying. Yet, this movie and the experience of watching it hunts us for days.
January 22, 2008
Years ago I found that our department had a 16mm print of this film, so I decided to show it to my Intro to Film class, as an excuse mainly for me to see it on film. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they hated it, with a few exceptions, but I was thrilled to discover that the print was pristine, probably because other teachers didn’t want to deal with showing this to undergrads in required classes.
Anyway, I had never thought of the Buddhist perspective you outline above, but I do agree about the uncomfortable position the film puts us in, and that, ultimately, is its power.