The most famous work of French left bank master Alain Resnais, an absolute revolution in film language. Alain Resnais combined Griet's rigorous, repetitive and unconnected reminiscence murmurs into a picture with concise and sharp editing and shot arrangement. The interspersed memories and the present, cross montages, still figures, moving shots, beautiful.
It's a movie with no story at all. All elements in the film come from Mr. X's memories. He met Ms. A in the splendid Baroque hotel. Mr. X said that he had met Ms. A in Marienbad a year ago. The two had sworn an oath. Ms. A asked Mr. X to wait for her for a year. A year later, and now, Ms. A will leave her husband and run away with Mr. X. But at this moment, Ms. A said that she had no memory of it, while Mr. X continued to use words to recall the scene a year ago, and the dialogue and details evoked Ms. A's memory.
All the pictures of memories are disordered and fragmented, and Renai also uses disordered and jumping pictures to truly present the state of memories. Renai often makes everyone in the film stand like statues, except for the hero and heroine, and the hero and heroine wander among the "statues". Mr. X in front of the poker table with the standing "Statue" big card. Such surreal freeze-frame processing puts the two of them at the center of their memories. There are only me and you in the memory, and the rest are blurry and static. This lens processing method almost concretizes our original memory logic, just as existentialism proposes of nothingness. We are constantly ignoring our own existence.
In the hotel, at home, in the garden, on the balcony, in the room, on the bed, all locations are quickly switched in the fragments of memories. The same sentence, in a different place, repeating a sentence, in a different place. The same picture of Ms. A wearing a white dress in the room flashed past several times. "No, I didn't wear a white dress!" Ms. A said. She refused to recall, or it was a fiction, she didn't know, and she didn't dare to ask. The power of words is that they can tell the memories in their minds, and they can also tell lies in their minds. But that's not the point of the film. Ms. A was shot by her husband on the bed, and she collapsed beside the bed with her hands open and a bullet hole above her head. It seems like a cowardly vision of betrayal and elopement. She asked Mr. X to wait a little longer, but Mr. X had been waiting for a year and did not want to wait any longer. She ended up following Mr. X, her husband standing on the stairs watching the two go away. Did they really meet in Marienbad? Did she really commit to a one-year date? Or is it just a ghostly lie? Or are they fantasies of escaping from reality?
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