The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

When they fail to see themselves as part of it, post-structuralists are missing the big structure. A film (or its creator) that aims to be so sophisticated that it can't be understood is only hiding its bourgeois banality beneath the surface. Let them, that's the art. This film is a game with no definitive solution, but by no means vacuous on that account. The purported vacuum is actually crammed with substance as the film plays on unreliable states of mind - memory, doubt, distrust, raising questions of sincerity, honour, even sanity.Superficially we have memory as the distance between two people. From evidence in his other work, it's tempting to assume that writer Robbe-Grillet intended the Stranger to be a kind of impostor. The Stranger describes details of events that he cannot know about, such as the woman's movements in her room. He spins an impromptu story about the figures in the statue and their dog. But the deception could equally be on her side - if she is afraid to remember, blocking an unpleasant memory.From another perspective, the man doesn't exist at all - he emerges from whispers seeming to seep from the fabric of the building itself. Fading in and out and repeated, these words are not of human origin, but brought into being by the memory of material things. Conjured into existence, Adam and Eve-like, they find themselves clinging to the worlds of their own phantom memories, his according to his desires, hers according to her fears, both of which displace reason or are displaced by reason. Underlying it all is the paranoia of uncertainty and lies, of not possessing, not winning. Built on this unreliable foundation, the past is born of a fabrication and elaborates gradually into something real. Memory can convince, as much as it can cast doubt.Just as the husband - a kind of magister ludi - cannot lose the game, the film also has things its own way, presenting two different realities like composited layers. Robbe-Grillet must have wanted these layers to clash like rocks, with percussive, discordant sounds effects, our illusions and prejudices fed by the uncertainty. Resnais, a humanist, made them blend serenely into each other, unable to resist reconciling the absurdity with some psychological sense and shape according to which the Stranger is sincere, the woman vulnerable.The psychology is largely environmental, everyone is reduced to a posture, turning into the statues that surround them, rigid with the lie of excessive formality, frozen by phatic conversation that is deliberately meant to avoid meaning. They shy away from the corporeality that implies baser qualities as they play the sophisticated game that has become their life.A game with no solution, a film with no key, ought to be quite disappointing. But existence never did have any clear answers. The fascination of it is in the uncertainty, and here, in the ambiguity.

"Last Year at Marienbad" features an arithmetic roster of characters— all of whom we only come to know as A, X, and M— who are in an opulent, seemingly deserted European château. A, a female, is pursued by X, a man who insists he met her the year before; she cannot remember him. The entirety of the film is essentially a mediation on this conflict that I frankly find near impossible to put into words.The straight truth about this film is that there is really nothing straight at all, and audiences who expect linear and clean-cut narrative structures should probably stay away. "Last Year at Marienbad" is a film that demands its audience to accept what it's offering at face value and allow themselves to be taken along for the journey, no matter how meandering, bizarre, or at times utterly incomprehensible it may be. I would liken it to the filmic equivalent of a hedge maze, though I'm not sure that really does it justice.There is not much in the way of plot here, but rather a meditative, repetitious engagement with vague themes and settings. The camera floats throughout the ornate château, moving through crowds of actors that at times stand still as if portraiture, or ghosts; dialogue fades in and out under the throttling score of a pipe organ, dispensing some portions information and leaving others inaccessible. Phrases, scenes, and images are repeated almost as incantations—we have a context, roughly speaking, but the puzzle still remains unfinished by the end.Aesthetically, I need not say more than that this film is beautiful, and contains some of the most stunning cinematography in film history. Though inarguably gorgeous and visually arresting, I do feel that many people fail to take note of just how unsettling this film really is. It defies categorization so I won't attempt that feat, but there is a sinister unease that pervades the entire film, largely intimated and unspoken; I would not call it a horror film, although I think there is a darker, more dangerous core than most people seem to be aware of. There are shades of Gothicism present, particularly in the way the film strives at capturing an atmosphere in favor of teleology.I won't divulge my thoughts or interpretations on the film here as I feel it's the wrong place for it, but I will say that this is without a doubt one of the most haunting movies I've ever seen, and its influence is wide-ranging; I believe we can see bits of it in everything from 1962's "Carnival of Souls" to Ingmar Bergman to contemporary filmmakers. You will know from the reverberant opening scene whether or not this is a film you want to engage with; for some, it will do little more than frustrate, but for others, it will spellbind, unnerve, and utterly absorb you. 10/10.

The highly acclaimed movie, Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Renais, is an unconventional and uncomfortable movie for the viewers that are used to a coherent narrative.The obsession with having uninteresting characters reciting poetry is a failed attempt to make this movie intellectually profound or meaningful.If all of this were not enough, for approximately 90 minutes, the viewer is haunted by the music from an organ that makes this cinematic experience an endless nightmare.I couldn't get any kind of excitement, just a great feeling of frustration in the end, not only because it's a difficult experience to understand but because it's extremely irrelevant.

There have been many, many discussions about the meaning that Resnais wanted to convey with Last Year in Marienbad. Having just listened to the interview that Resnais gives (in French) about the movie (and which is available on the Criterion edition), and having the additional luck to speak French as my first language, I can confidently say that Resnais seemed extremely ambiguous about any meaning that the film might or might not have. By meaning, I am referring to any single interpretation or rational explanation of the movie. The author of an artistic piece, whether it is painting, music, sculpture or any medium of expression, does not have any obligation to provide a formal explanation of his/her work.Very simply said, I believe that Resnais, here, managed to make a film in the same way as any other artist using any other form of artistic expression. And he succeeded beautifully. We are hypnotized by the sheer, amazing beauty of the images and the actors, the pathos-inducing organ playing and the playful tricks that Resnais spread throughout the dialogues/monologues, the sets, the reflections in the mirrors, and the whole bagful of cinematographic visual gimmicks, charades and deceptions and then some more. This alone exerts a fascination on the viewer, and simply by shutting down the analytical part of one's brain - something akin to the full sensory availability or receptiveness one can achieve practising yoga or TM -, one finds out that a LOT is happening in Last Year in Marienbad.When watching the film in such a state of receptiveness, the artistic value of Last Year in Marienbad begins to take over, and the urge to find a single logical thread, or any thread at all, tends to dwindle and allow one to really enjoy the pure experience of watching that movie. LYAM is not a popcorn/Tweeting-while-watching kind of film, by far and large: one must be entirely available, both mentally and physically to appreciate it totally. Difficult movie? Sure. Aggravating? Yes. It's not a flawless masterpiece. Like the jury at the 1961 Cannes Festival, I find Giorgio Albertazzi's (X) accent absolutely grating on my nerves, and the artistic choice of using the combination of a refrigerating, detached acting style with an artificial, pretentious-sounding, emotionless and mechanical tone of speaking (verging on the ridiculous), a resounding mistake. Despite these flaws, and choosing to accept them nonetheless, LYAM remains in its form an exquisitely beautiful movie and a pure ravishment for the senses. It is also probably the purest form of expression the seventh art ever reached. It's likely the closest a film has ever been from expressing the feeling of abstraction that lies at the blurred frontier between wakefulness and sleep. An oneiric film that compares with all other abstract forms of art.I listened very closely to Resnais in the interview I was mentioning at the beginning. I really don't think he had a clean-cut, first-degree story to tell with this movie. He clearly leaves you the impression that he was first and foremost seduced by the aesthetic values of the script Robbe-Grillet had sent him. That was his leitmotiv and that was the leitmotiv he also tried to convey with the movie.I was intrigued by the suggestion made not only by Ginette Vincendeau, the cinema scholar who is interviewed on the Criterion Supplement DVD, but also by Resnais himself in an interview apparently made around the time that LYAM was released (according to Mrs. Vincendeau's recollection - I didn't look for that interview yet), that the movie's actual subject is rape. Of course, rape is one among the few first-degree meanings that anyone with a brain can deduce easily in several scenes of the movie. Until I learned about this, I could not really decide that the idea of a rape was formally presented in LYAM. As for all concrete suggestions that come to mind when absorbing the film, there always remains a feeling of ambiguity that prevents the idea that this deals with rape from gelling. But if it is true that LYAM actually deals with rape in a topical manner, I will soon revisit the movie keeping this in mind. As a note of caution, however: in Resnais' interview on the Criterion DVD, Resnais later seemed to deny that we should view the culprit scenes as depicting a rape.Decidedly, LYAM is the cinematographic representation of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. That is, when you see something in the movie, you automatically end up missing something else that then escapes your detection, with the result that you can never obtain a full knowledge of the movie's content. Or, let's say that the film's beauty is as evanescent as the most delicate and colourful jellyfish's: you can only contemplate it from behind a glass panel in an aquarium. As soon as you remove it from its element to better watch it, it then becomes a lump of amorphous jelly that evokes disgust instead of the exhilaration felt when a barrier existed between the animal and you.