Last Year at Marienbad

Last Year at Marienbad, released in the United Kingdom as Last Year in Marienbad, is a 1961 French New Wave film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Set in a palace in a park that has been converted into a luxury hotel, it stars Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi as a woman and a man who may have met the year before and may have contemplated or started an affair, with Sacha Pitoëff as a second man who may be the woman's husband. The characters are unnamed. Plot In an ornate baroque hotel populated by wealthy individuals and couples who socialize with each other, a man approaches a woman and claims they met the year before at a similar resort (perhaps at Frederiksbad, Karlstadt, Marienbad, or Baden-Salsa) and had a romantic relationship, but she responded to his request to run away together by asking him to wait a year, which time has now elapsed. The woman insists she has never met the man, so he proceeds to attempt to remind her of their shared past, while she rebuffs him and contradicts his account. Between interactions with the woman, a second man, who may be the woman's husband, asserts his dominance over the first man by repeatedly beating him at a mathematical game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the three characters. Conversations and events are repeated in different places in the building and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the hotel's corridors with ambiguous and repetitive voice-overs. No certain conclusion is offered regarding what is real and what is imagined, but at the end of the film, the woman submits and leaves the hotel with the first man.