A man meets a woman at a luxurious palace turned palace and tries to remind her that they've met before, perhaps there, or somewhere else, perhaps last year or another time. Perhaps is a keyword in this movie because nothing is certain.
This is Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's film equivalent of the nouveau roman. It's a movie more concerned with structure and visual and linguistic games than characterisation or sense, which means any empathy for the characters is out of the question; the actors might have been cardboards for all it mattered, sputtering their lines without any emotion.
It's a movie about cinema, an exploration of the way time and space are portrayed in this medium. It's especially fascinating for its editing: time and space changes at random without nexus, sentences are repeated, nothing is certain.
If Resnais sought to create a puzzle without a solution, he certainly achieved his goal. This is one of those solipsistic works of art that begs to be interpreted and analysed and have ridiculous theses written about it, although it doesn't really mean anything concrete.
Fascinating editing and beautiful black-and-white cinematography. Compliments end here for this humourless, joyless movie. There are great masters of the avant-garde cinema who can make enjoyable movies - Buñuel, Hans Richter, Cocteau - and then there's Resnais who takes himself more serious than a heart attack. Any viewer who conceives life as a pointless, uneventful existence, will feel himself at home in Marienbad.
This is Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's film equivalent of the nouveau roman. It's a movie more concerned with structure and visual and linguistic games than characterisation or sense, which means any empathy for the characters is out of the question; the actors might have been cardboards for all it mattered, sputtering their lines without any emotion.
It's a movie about cinema, an exploration of the way time and space are portrayed in this medium. It's especially fascinating for its editing: time and space changes at random without nexus, sentences are repeated, nothing is certain.
If Resnais sought to create a puzzle without a solution, he certainly achieved his goal. This is one of those solipsistic works of art that begs to be interpreted and analysed and have ridiculous theses written about it, although it doesn't really mean anything concrete.
Fascinating editing and beautiful black-and-white cinematography. Compliments end here for this humourless, joyless movie. There are great masters of the avant-garde cinema who can make enjoyable movies - Buñuel, Hans Richter, Cocteau - and then there's Resnais who takes himself more serious than a heart attack. Any viewer who conceives life as a pointless, uneventful existence, will feel himself at home in Marienbad.