Dislocation at Noon at Midnight

Gothic, surrealist, stately, slow . . . . haunting and bee-zarrr, Last Year in Marienbad is a classic French film that will mystify and intrigue, or drive you right up a wall. And those walls are sumptuous.
The film is set perhaps in what was once called Czechoslovakia. We don’t really know, because we’re never really sure if we’re in the present, in the past, in an invented past or present. Resnais does give verbal, musical and visual clues that shift the time, but as the film progresses, we trust those clues less and less. Is it all in the mind of X, the narrator? Is he actually talking to A, the woman he claims he met in the spa town Marienbad last year? Does her lover or her husband or her Svengali, M, pull all the strings?
Three characters, no names. X (Giorgio Albertazzi), A (Delphine Seyrig) and M (Sacha … Click to continue . . .