LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (68)

Directed by: Alain Resnais (1961)

Starring: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff

The Pitch: In a vast, baroque hotel, a woman meets a man who insists she had an affair with him the previous year in Frederiksbad - or was it Marienbad?

Theo Sez: Undeniably great, or at least unique, but the spell starts to falter a little as it becomes clear the onslaught of style isn't really in the service of grand themes - Chance, Memory, Identity - but a middle-aged Euro-dude trying to worm his way into a girl's pants. The first half-hour casts the spell, with its gliding (pre-Steadicam!) camera and people frozen in elaborate tableaux, its influence felt in films both contemporary - trapped group also in THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, hotel corridors in THE SILENCE - and far in the future (one assumes Kubrick must've been quite taken with it); astonishing moments incl. the downright Lynchian dance scene - shadowy couples swaying in detached, dreamlike precision - blinding-white shots of Seyrig in her room intruding on the darkness of the bar, first just a couple of frames for near-subliminal effect then more and more (Dennis Hopper used a variation in his dissolve-through-cuts transitions in EASY RIDER), and that iconic shot of the garden spread out before the craning camera, geometric cone-shrubs and perfectly posed inhabitants with unnaturally long shadows giving it the clarity of a painting (Magritte, surely?). Resnais does a very pointed jump-cut when Heroine asks "Did we meet by chance?" and Hero replies "I don't know", as if to drop a major clue about whatever drives the gorgeous enervation - the inevitability behind 'random' meetings, what we call Fate or Love (and try to rationalise with names and dates - last year at Marienbad - when we need to just lose ourselves in it, as urged by the final voice-over) - but you couldn't call it intelligible, at least on first viewing ; has that absent quality of certain (esp. academic) writing, where you plough onward hypnotised by abstruse blocks of text only to be suddenly brought up short by a striking phrase or unexpected insight, and realise you haven't really been paying attention. One of those phenomena - Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" was another, for those with long memories of 80s music - that wear their eccentricity with such unembarrassment they manage to cross over into pop culture, on the simple, what-you-see-is-what-you-get principle that anything so wilfully different must be as transparently itself - hence unthreatening - as any blockbuster. Cry of Desperation Dept.: can a mathematical whiz-kid please explain that maddening (yet addictive) 7-5-3-1 card game?...