Total Cinema

After the first twenty minutes I had to admit that without at least a nodding acquaintance with the nouveau roman and the cinematographic nouvelle vague the film presented almost insurmountable obstacles for the routine movie-goer. I don’t think I break the rules of reviewing if I reveal the “plot,” since it is the least essential aspect of two hours’ haunting experience. It is the usual triangle: wife, husband, lover. But in what a relationship and in what a setting! The lover tries to persuade the wife that they have met once before, last year at Marienbad, and that she had then promised to leave her husband and follow him. The setting is the halls and parks of an old-world luxury hotel with guests and servants moving noiselessly, fragments of idle conversation overheard, fleeting glances at endless card games.

In this tranquil atmosphere, the camera achieves a combination of virtuosity and poetic wonder: it moves like a ghost in a haunted house, accompanied by the lover’s even, yet passionate and plaintive story as he evokes the situations which the young woman is supposed to remember from last year. It is a pressing, obsessive courtship, the like of which no film ever showed before—with only the camera insisting, as it circles the corridors and the gardens and forces its recurrent images into her reluctant consciousness.

TM

About the Author

Thomas Molnar

Featured Tags

After the first twenty minutes I had to admit that without at least a nodding acquaintance with the nouveau roman and the cinematographic nouvelle vague the film presented almost insurmountable obstacles for the routine movie-goer. I don’t think I break the rules of reviewing if I reveal the “plot,” since it is the least essential aspect of two hours’ haunting experience. It is the usual triangle: wife, husband, lover. But in what a relationship and in what a setting! The lover tries to persuade the wife that they have met once before, last year at Marienbad, and that she had then promised to leave her husband and follow him. The setting is the halls and parks of an old-world luxury hotel with guests and servants moving noiselessly, fragments of idle conversation overheard, fleeting glances at endless card games.

In this tranquil atmosphere, the camera achieves a combination of virtuosity and poetic wonder: it moves like a ghost in a haunted house, accompanied by the lover’s even, yet passionate and plaintive story as he evokes the situations which the young woman is supposed to remember from last year. It is a pressing, obsessive courtship, the like of which no film ever showed before—with only the camera insisting, as it circles the corridors and the gardens and forces its recurrent images into her reluctant consciousness.