L'Année dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961 (last year in Marienbad) A man tries to convince a woman that they had a relationship last year, and the woman denies, denies, struggles... The whole plot takes place in a castle. It begins with a recitation of a soundtrack poem, and the camera shows the baroque complexity of endless corridors, carpets, doors, and mirrors. It takes a few minutes to realize that these sounds are from a play, and the expressionless audience under the stage is constantly being shocked. The director freezes for a few seconds before continuing to move slowly like a robot... From this, the whole film has been on the road of disrupting the narrative layers and chronological order. The past and present shots are switched and repeated indiscriminately, and it is impossible to judge the chronological order, and it is impossible to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Together with endless corridors, carpets and mirrors, the robot-like people with no heart and no identity constitute a labyrinthine and false world with no way out. The feelings of the male and female protagonists are the products of this world. Even the ending is unclear, so I simply gave a few endings: the heroine was shot to death by her husband, the heroine rejected the hero, and the heroine eloped with the hero. No one is more joyful or sad, and it's hard to even feel that this is the end. Everything flows and repeats in the recitation of the soundtrack poem in the same tone, and nothing goes out of the castle... It's almost a "soundtrack poem recitation" type movie, but Alain Resnais is still better than the Duras I watched a few days ago. The movie is higher than I don't know how many grades. While radically subverting the narrative, what is presented is layered, scattered, and emotionally flowing. When the face of Delphine Seyrig, who was almost as cold as everyone around her, burst into tears, the scene turned out to be touching... The evaluation of this film, which won the Golden Lion Award in Venice in 1961, is still very divided. But it did have a profound impact on many later directors from Fellini to Lynch and even Nolan, and it can be regarded as one of the many new ways the new wave has opened up for movies.
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