vii

"Excuse me, didn’t we meet at that party last year?"
The worst of pickup lines perhaps, but the premise of Last Year At Marienbad, another Alan Resnais film. Nothing happens in it. A man tries to convince a lady that they met the previous year at a lavish mansion resort. She cannot remember. Throughout the 2 hours, he gnaws at her, feeding her, repeatedly bits of memory, describing what she was wearing, how her hands were palced, the statues that they stood under. All this shot in gorgeously arranged black and white, where the actors are props and the props – the interiors, wooden furniture, ornate paneling, baroque ceilings, unending corridors, lush carpets, polished surfaces, miles of mirrors, unopened doors and a impossibly symmetric garden - are explored incessantly. The tension arises from whether or not we remember correctly or accurately scenes that are shown over and over, not repeated ad naseum but layered textures of images that seem so similar that we ask, "Haven't we been here before?"
The actors are props. Many scenes have the cast frozen, standing statue-like but never statuesque as the protagonist find the moment, enact their little tete a tetes. A glass drops, shatters. Nobody moves but the waiter, and the camera stays on him for the excruciating length of time that it takes for him to pick up every piece. The shots vary – up close then a jump cut from high in the rafters – the mundane becomes pregnant with tension as the rest of the world stops.
The third character. The lady’s lover or husband? "Let me show you a game that I never lose." "If you never lose it is not a game." "I can lose – but I never will." The running action motif, that simple game where sticks, cards, tokens are placed in a rows then eliminated, the loser being the one forced to pick the last one. Played over and over with a variety of opponents, in different spaces – always a climax – will he lose? "I never will" he fires a gun – at her? In the bedroom. But she is left, standing and unsure at the end of that impossible garden that casts no shadows, wondering if her memory, which has come to believe she did once love, serves her well.