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Film: Last Year In Marienbad
Year of production: 1961
UK Release date: 8th July 2011
Distributor: BFI
Certificate: U
Running time: 94 mins
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff, Françoise Bertin, Luce Garcia-Ville
Genre: Drama/Mystery/Romance
Format: Cinema
Country of Production: France/Italy
Language: French
Review by: Anna Attallah
Baffling and enchanting critics in equal measure, whether Last Year In Marienbad leaves you bewildered or firmly under its spell, it is a cinematic experience that cannot be ignored. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, this icon of European art house cinema influenced countless films, including Vertigo and The Shining, with a tale that is both enigmatically dreamlike and just plain weird.
In the beautifully intricate corridors and stately rooms of an imposing baroque hotel, a nameless stranger, credited as X (Georgio Albertazzi), stalks the elegant woman A (Delphine Seyrig), who he claims he had a love affair with the previous year.
As the story is built, layer upon layer, rotating seamlessly between the past and present, we learn that she supposedly promised X a year ago that after a year had passed they would meet again and run away together.
Shadowed by another sinister man who may or may not be her husband (Sacha Pitoëff), the woman vehemently denies she ever made such a promise, or, indeed, that they know each other at all, as fact and fiction become increasingly blurred.
Men in tuxedoes robotically fire pistols in an unexplained shooting gallery, elegantly dressed guests inexplicably freeze in mid-conversation and the layout of the hotel and gardens is constantly shape-shifting (the action was shot in three different locations).
Whilst events intensify and the flashbacks become even more surreal and threatening, the action builds to a dramatic crescendo, posing more questions than it answers...
This film tore up the cinematic rulebook in 1961 and is still provoking debate and dividing opinions fifty years later. Like all works of modern art, there are those who dismiss it as pretentious nonsense and those who claim it is a masterpiece, but even on a purely cinematic level, you cannot fail to be impressed by the way the camera transforms into an artist’s brush in the hands of Alain Resnais and his cinematographer Sasha Vierny. Long tracking shots and disjointed flashbacks create impressions and images which question whether the narrator’s memory is accurate or if he is making it up as he goes along. Unsettling organ music heightens the feeling of oppression, as the hotel, which should ooze glamour and sophistication, instead becomes an ominous prison populated by gorgeously dressed mannequins. The narration itself is also musical, elegantly poetic and endlessly cyclical, it rarely stops and has a hypnotic quality which heightens the disconcerting sense that this is all a dream – or a nightmare.
It is clear that many horror films owe a certain debt to Last Year In Marienbad, which shows that subtle tension can be created easily without scary CGI effects with something as simple as a woman and a bed. We can recognise the lingering long shots of the hotel’s corridors in The Shining and A’s ambiguous lover M, played by Sacha Pitoëff, wouldn’t look out of place as Dracula with his corpse-like looks and icy demeanour. Georgio Albertazzi seems innocent enough as the gloomy narrator, yet even he takes on a menacing air as we begin to question his motives and even his sanity when he becomes more and more insistent in his pursuit of Delphine Seyrig. It is a credit to her charisma that she doesn’t fade into the background; having minimal dialogue, in comparison to Georgio Albertazzi, she is practically silent for the whole film. Nevertheless, she is not just a seductive bit of eye candy dressed in striking outfits (designed by none other than Coco Chanel), she is an accomplished actress who drives most of the disquieting tension of the plot.
Given that the occupants of the hotel are so mannequin-like it is no surprise that the film recently served as inspiration for Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel Spring/Summer 2011 collection, where the models strutted their stuff on a catwalk based on Marienbad’s immaculate geometric garden. This is the setting of the famous still where the people have shadows, yet the trees and shrubs do not, and it is these experimental touches which root this world in a sort of hallucinogenic reality.
Sacha Pitoëff is constantly shown playing what appears to be a completely pointless game of chance – a version of pick-up sticks which any 5-year-old could master. It is, however, an ancient Chinese game called “Nim”, which requires an enormous amount of mathematical precision and skill. This is clearly a sly wink to the audience from Resnais, a small reminder that although we suspect this is all just random self-indulgence, it has in fact been meticulously planned.
Last Year In Marienbad may have popularised a surrealist aesthetic which now seems dated, but it is also an aesthetic which walks a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Whether Resnais succeeds is open to everyone’s interpretation, and it is this that gives beauty to this cult classic. A film that forces you to engage and puzzle over what it’s all about. One thing is certain, this is a film made to be seen on the big screen – and it’s a trance-like trip that is well worth it. AA
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Film: Wild Grass
Release date: 8th November 2010
Certificate: 12
Running time: 105 mins
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric
Genre: Drama/Romance
Studio: New Wave
Format: DVD
Country: France/Italy
As Alain Resnais ages so do his regular cast members. Here, Sabine Azéma and Andre Dussollier reprise their familiar roles in the most recent of the octogenarian filmmaker’s offbeat romances. Based on Christian Gailly's novel L'Incident, the film focuses on the aftermath of a seemingly innocuous incident.
While shopping in Paris, Marguerite Muir (Azéma) has her handbag snatched by a rollerblading mugger. Georges Palet (Dussollier) subsequently finds her discarded purse and develops an inexplicably intense interest in her photographic ID and pilot’s licence. This leads to a series of one-sided phone calls and letters – straightforward but motiveless stalking, to all intents and purposes.
George’s intentions are never fully (or even partially explained), and there is something disconcertingly sinister about his obsession with the frizzy haired Marguerite – not least when he slashes her car tyres. Perhaps even more difficult to understand is why Marguerite suddenly becomes interested in her pursuer...
It’s an oddity of a film, even by Resnais’ opaque standards. The voiceover which narrates proceedings is lifted directly from the novel upon which the movie is based and is faithful to the original text, yet it reveals very little and poses more questions than it answers.
The character of Georges is deliberately mysterious – hardly an original concept – yet he is so enigmatic as to be frustrating. Occasional glimpses of murderous intent and his suspicion of those in uniform and their reciprocal distaste for him hint at a criminal past. But equally he could just be a bored fantasist with a runaway imagination. Refusing to divulge this information gives the film an ambiguity which makes it difficult to invest much in its central character – a flaw which could have been remedied if Marguerite was fleshed out more fully.
The stalked female lead is played with familiar skittishness by Azéma in a style well-known to those who’ve seen her previous performances in Resnais’ films. Sadly, the sketchy characterisation and baffling interest in her middle-aged pursuer make it difficult to warm to her. Even her kookily frizzy red hair seems like an affectation too far.
Despite the character flaws, it’s a stylish piece of work. The whimsical opening as Marguerite shops for shoes is wonderfully shot, with her face never revealed (just that hair!) even as she sees her handbag waving in the wind as it is snatched. It’s a stunning camera shot – a justifiable use of slow-motion and vividly contrasting colours.
Indeed, the film is full of colour, from Marguerite’s neon-lit apartment and gaudy yellow car to George’s lush green grass. The sets are as lavish as the characters are sparse and often shot in pastel-hued soft focus – even the turquoise desk at police HQ disappears into the fuzzy distance as Marguerite inquires after her pursuer.
Georges’ lawn is not the only grass which features in the film. Opening with tufts of greenery pointing through a cracked footpath, the action is interspersed with images of wild grass throughout. It’s difficult to say which of these represents Georges most accurately – does his well tended garden hint at the order he craves whilst being tempted to the wilder side of the untamed wild grass? Or has he arrived at order in his home life having eschewed the ‘wild’ side. Again, the movie’s ambiguity prevents an easy answer being reached.
If anything the film becomes less linear as it reaches its conclusion. Scenes which are presumably hypothetical are played out in the imaginations of the characters – these scenes within scenes occur in ‘thought bubbles’ which recall Resnais’ earlier film I Want To Go Home. A confusingly edited scene between Georges and two policemen descends into incomprehensibility as lines are repeated, and unusual cuts and zooms are employed to destroy any sense of conversation or convention.
The ending of the film is unsatisfying, but predictably so. After posing so many unanswered questions during the course of Wild Grass there was no way Resnais would cap it off with a conventional climax.
Wild Grass is lovely to look at but difficult to love. Resnais can be infuriatingly flippant, and here his stylistic quirks and tricks are not strong enough to carry the interest of the viewer from start to finish. A film requires characters and/or a plot strong enough to sustain the audience’s interest. Here, Resnais provides neither, and, as such, the film is a triumph of style over substance. RW
Film: Wild Grass
Release date: 18th June 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 105 mins
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric
Genre: Drama
Studio: New Wave
Format: Cinema
Country: France/Italy
When two paths cross, lives entwine in a collision of unlikely, unexpected and fantastic new relationships. New Wave veteran Alain Resnais reveals an internal world of fanciful fairytale rationalised by reality in his adaptation of Christian Gailly’s L’incident.
Opening in a chic Parisian shopping centre, the viewer is introduced to Marguerite Muir (Azéma) - that is, introduced to her flaming bush of scarlet frizz, for she remains faceless for over six minutes as cinematographer Eric Gautier places the viewer in the midst of the city with voyeuristic shots. Content with her latest splurge, the camera follows Muir as she leaves her favourite shoe shop, but her joy is short lived when her bag is snatched by a petty thief.
This is when Georges Palet (played by Resnais regular Dussollier) enters the film. He stumbles upon her discarded wallet and sets the entire film in motion. Thanks to Muir’s pilot’s licence, Palet finds himself equipped with her phone number and address, and spends days contemplating whether to spice up his middle-class life by making contact with the stranger.
As he debates his course of action, the viewer is left to ponder his true colours and underlying motive - Palet’s voice over candidly admits to intentions that are less than savoury, creating something of an ongoing theme that is never fully explained, explored or even justified. Eventually the amateur detective leaves his mission to the professionals, and hands his discovery in to the police.
On retrieving her purse from the police station, Muir asks after its rescuer, and obtains Palet’s phone number. She politely calls him to thank him for his efforts, unwittingly provoking his fixation. The awkward conversation that proceeds sets the tone for the next chunk of the film, whereby Palet’s pursuit increases in intensity, resulting in him visiting her home, leaving letters in her post box and even slashing her tyres. In one of the film’s rare pinches of logic, Muir seeks advice from the law - but refrains from pressing charges. However, Palet’s attention is gradually igniting a spark of interest within her, and the stalker is in danger of becoming the stalked…
Resnais complains that the majority of filmmakers claim that their calling lies in revealing reality through film, adding that his sentiments therefore sway towards contradicting that trend. This may account for his obscure deviations from the main story, which is left as a frayed piece of rope with no tie to bring the loose ends together. For example, as Palet and Muir’s remote relationship draws them ever closer, Resnais and Gailly happily fulfil the inevitable prospect of having the characters meet in person. During the build up to this guiltily satisfying scene, the viewer is invited into their private lives; friends and family are introduced to the audience and each other - mingling across the Muir-Palet border.
On the other hand, the voiceovers that divulge the characters’ thoughts, although rather surreal and invalid in the context of the plot, indicate exactly what Resnais intends to avoid - reality; that is, real characters with real thoughts. Who hasn’t mulled over sinister fantasies when aggravated? That doesn’t make anyone a murderer, yet in the cinematic world, audiences have been conditioned to expect an extensive back-story to justify such an event. Resnais has escaped this anticipation, where he readily conforms in other scenes. These telling voiceovers make you unsure of the characters with Palet, in particular, having hints of schizophrenic tendencies - on occasion, the viewer is left to wonder whether he can actually distinguish between reality and fantasy.
Wild Grass is a stylised film, with Gautier’s presence shaping the entire film. Where voiceovers fail to convey the exact speculations of characters, hypothetical scenes are played out onscreen as thought bubbles laid over shots of the ‘real’ world. To add to that air of ambiguous uncertainty, they are often lived out several times, edited and then replayed, in an effective visual representation of a universal, if subconscious, mental process. Gautier’s eye for composition is often flaunted, with perfectly poised shots that see characters framed in such a way as to reinforce the voyeuristic values that penetrate the film. Use of colour is striking, at no point more so than when Muir drives through the nocturnal roads of Paris, her face reflecting the flickering neon lights that drench the deserted streets.
Wild Grass is a simple film made to appear much more complex than it really is. The peculiar characters, with their enigmatic backgrounds and sometimes surprising relationships, help dress the piece in robes of depth, but Resnais’s recent bias towards the light-hearted side of film is nonetheless prominent in his most recent effort. For all its eccentricity, the story is thin and flimsy, characters are somewhat frustrating and difficult to empathise with, and the plot digressions are meaningless.
Bizarrely, the climactic scene between the two protagonists, which is another trap that manages to surprise precisely because of its predictability, is not the climax of the film.
As aesthetically pleasing as Wild Grass may be, Resnais’s priorities seem to lie simply in contradicting, bluffing and double-bluffing audience anticipation. Rather than making a film of substance that tells a story, confusion seems to be Resnais’ sole motivation. RS
Film: The Alain Resnais Collection
Release date: 21st June 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 394 mins
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Gerard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Adolph Green, Pierre Arditi, Vittorio Gassman
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: France/Brazil
Octogenarian French film-maker Alain Resnais has been directing films for over sixty years. Formerly friends with The Doors’ Jim Morrison and latterly with Alan Ayckbourn, his career has flirted with French New Wave and box office success but tailed off dramatically in the 1980s. Critical and commercial success were regained in 1993 with Smoking/No Smoking, but is it now time to reassess his eighties output?
The Alain Resnais Collection groups together Life Is A Bed Of Roses (1983), Love Unto Death (1984), Mélo (1986) and I Want To Go Home (1989) and offers a chance to revisit his tales of love, death and discovery.
Life Is A Bed Of Roses weaves three disparate stories together into a light-hearted musical. Beginning with the construction of a Temple of Happiness, and a bizarre social experiment by wealthy Michel Forbek (Ruggero Raimondi), the film then moves to a more modern setting where the same building has been re-invented as an educational establishment. Between these two plots is another more abstract story about a medieval jousting competition.
It’s never quite clear what the film is trying to say or why. The occasional inexplicable bursts of song add little – the tone of the film is whimsical enough without needing to resort to such a technique. The melding of the three stories doesn’t quite work – the Python-esque style of the medieval scenes looks good but adds little – and it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that the sumptuous visuals and excellent cast mean that this film is less than the sum of its parts.
Love Unto Death and Mélo are companion pieces which share the same aesthetic, themes and even the same cast. Both are ruminations on mortality and love, dealing with the death of a partner from illness and suicide respectively, and the subsequent aftermath.
The central couple in both films are played by Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi, a piece of casting that works remarkably well. Azéma is considerably younger than her on-screen partner, and given the flighty nature of the female characters this works remarkably well alongside the more measured and authoritative presence of Arditi. Supporting performances come from Fanny Ardant and the enigmatic André Dussollier. There are very few other characters in either film, and those that do appear serve merely to develop the plot.
Love Unto Death opens with the sudden and inexplicable death of Simon (Arditi) who is then mysteriously restored to life. What follows is an existential drama as Elisabeth (Azéma), his partner, falls deeper in love with the seemingly doomed Simon. Meanwhile their friends from the priesthood, Jérôme (Dussollier) and Judith (Ardant) discover that their own religious beliefs are challenged by the low-key unravelling of the plot.
The film unfolds slowly and quietly, with much dialogue and little in the way of action. Each scene is bookended by an orchestral score playing over an image of a snowy night sky. This provides the film with a strangely rhythmic sense, and a period in which the audience can reflect on what came before, turning the movie into a slow burning and introspective creation.
Mélo is more obviously theatrical, which is unsurprising given that it started life as a play by Henri Bernstein. It’s not difficult at all to imagine how the script would have worked on stage, with each scene occurring in a static setting with a tight focus on two or three characters at any given time. Characters are prone to long monologues, and scenes are edited almost like stage-cuts, with long fades to black leading into the following set-piece.
The story focuses on an illicit affair between Romaine (Azéma) and Marcel (Dussollier) behind the back of Pierre (Arditi). Set in 1920s Paris, the film evokes a world of flappers and concert musicians, which is drenched in melodrama. There’s something almost Brechtian about the style of the film, with theatrical over-acting rarely giving an impression of realism. Even scenes where the key characters play music look extremely clumsy – representations rather than a serious attempt at replicating truth.
The film always seems set to end in tragedy, and the drastic action that Romaine takes to keep her affair secret comes as no surprise. It does, however, set up the best scene of the film, a finely acted confrontation between the two male leads which changes pace and tone subtly throughout – it’s slightly at odds with the over-the-top acting which precedes it but it’s a fine tête-à-tête nonetheless.
A more absurdist approach permeates I Want To Go Home. At times the film almost becomes a comic caper as Joey Wellman (Adolph Green) a Jewish American cartoonist - who bears more than a passing resemblance to numerous Woody Allen characters - travels to Paris for an exhibition and an attempted reunification with his estranged daughter Elsie (Laura Benson).
Gerard Depardieu appears as philandering philosopher Gaulthier, who is a fan of Wellman’s work, and the action thus shifts from downtown Paris to the Frenchman’s mother’s country pile. Here a masked ball and some Carry On-style sexual shenanigans provide an amusing and diverting penultimate scene prior to the somewhat predictably redemptive ending.
Featuring cartoon cats interacting with humans, characters riding bicycles in full armour and Depardieu dressed as Popeye, the light comic touches keep the movie ticking along nicely. The real star of the show, however, is Adolph Green. His performance drives the movie as his tough exterior gradually melts and his xenophobia gives way to a mellow acceptance of French life and of his daughter’s lifestyle.
There is plenty to interest fans of Resnais in this collection, but it’s easy to see why these movies are regarded as some of the weaker elements of his canon, and it’s hard to imagine they will convert non-believers. RW
Interview courtesy New Wave Films.
Born 3rd June 1922, Alain Resnais’ directorial debut came back in 1936 with L'aventure de Guy. He has gone on to direct another 47 movies, picking up numerous awards across Europe for esteemed pieces such as 1980’s Mon oncle d'Amérique and 2006’s Coeurs. With his latest effort, Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles), he has reinterpreted Christina Gailly’s acclaimed novel L’Incident…
How did you decide to adapt Christian Gailly’s novel L’Incident for the screen?
The producer, Jean-Louis Livi had asked me to make a film for him. Initially, we had agreed that it would be the adaptation of a stage play. I had already read about thirty plays when I happened upon a novel by Christian Gailly, a writer whose engaging, ironic and melancholy voice had struck me during a radio programme hosted by Alain Veinstein on France Culture. I was won over by this novel to the extent that I immediately read another and called Jean-Louis Livi the very next day to tell him, “That sound, that blue note we’ve been looking for all these weeks, I think I may have found it.”
Gailly’s writing is so musical that I realized if I talked to someone after finishing one of his books, I would start speaking like his characters. His dialogues are like solos or numbers for duettists that are waiting only for the actors to perform them. Irène Lindon, the head of Les Éditions de Minuit, the firm that has published Gailly’s thirteen novels, told us that the film rights for twelve of them were available. I therefore asked to meet Gailly. He gave me total freedom as to the choice of the book that I would film, since I had only read four of them at that point, but he seemed concerned that the film might upset his schedule, since he wished to devote all his energy to the novel that he was writing. Therefore, I timidly suggested that I would never bother him, never ask him for additional scenes or for his opinion on the adaptation or the choice of actors, and that I would only show him the film once we had an answer print that he could approve or otherwise. I then saw a big smile appear on his face.
Over the next few days, I read the novels that I still had left to discover, and I suggested to Jean‐Louis Livi that we adapt L’Incident, a novel that he himself had already thought of. This novel was more expensive to film than most of the others, but Livi, with the help of the executive producer, Julie Salvador, felt that we could attempt the undertaking.
What particularly won you over in L’Incident?
I sensed a syncopated and almost improvised side to the novel, a skill for the variation on ‘standards’, in the musical sense. I was also struck by the stubbornness of Georges Palet and Marguerite Muir, the protagonists, who are incapable of resisting the desire to carry out irrational acts, and who display incredible vitality in what we can look on as a headlong rush into confusion. L’Incident talks about “the desire for desire”, as Livi puts it - this desire that arises in Georges from nothing, before he even meets Marguerite or speaks to her on the phone, and that then feeds off itself.
Why have you entitled the film Les Herbes Folles?
This title seemed to me to correspond to these characters who follow totally unreasonable impulses, like those seeds that make the most of cracks in the asphalt in the city or in a stone wall in the country to grow where no one is expecting them.
You have remained faithful to the novel’s dialogue...
Yes, of course, since the dialogue is what attracted me. In any case, Gailly acted as a reference for us from start to finish, he was our tuning fork in our attempts to strike the right note. The actors, André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Michel Vuillermoz, and all the others I wish I could mention here, read several of his books with passion, and this stimulated their creativity. This was a pure joy for me! The same phenomenon occurred with the crew. When we had to find a solution for a given problem, it was Gailly’s whole body of work that inspired us.
During shooting, we tried to find equivalences for Gailly’s style, for his way of interrupting a sentence in the middle with a full stop, for the fluctuations of the narrator played by Edouard Baer who hesitates and corrects himself, without forgetting the flagrant contradictions of the characters and their successive impulses. Gailly often uses the affirmative and the negative in the same sentence and so, in writing the adaptation with Laurent Herbiet, we tried to come up with a scene breakdown that would resemble this duality, that would allow yes and no to cohabit in the film’s splices and in the actors’ performances. All these choices were made naturally, in a lively manner, and without any preconceived plan, since I shoot to see how the scene will be shot.
The set designer Jacques Saulnier, and the director of photography Éric Gautier, who were there from the very first day, worked in the same direction. In a set, there’s a splash of colour, it is stopped right there, like a brushstroke, we move on to another colour. Gautier didn’t hesitate to use colour without blending the hues. The colours follow one another, without any transition, they do not dissolve. And the composer Mark Snow looked for clear‐cut and syncopated effects by using very different musical styles from one scene to another. With a guide like Gailly, one simply lets oneself be carried along. NW
(Excerpted from an interview with François Thomas)
