Last Year at Marienbad: 60 years
August 29 marks the 60th anniversary of the premiere of one of the most controversial works of world cinema. We are talking about the picture of Alain Resnais "L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)".
The film "Last Year at Marienbad" was directed by Alain Resnais based on a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Alain Robbe-Grillet, an agronomist by education, at the age of 27 decided to change his occupation and instead of working as an engineer at the Colonial Institute of Fruit and Citrus Crops, become a writer. In 1949, he wrote the novel "Un Régicide". Which no one has published for 30 years. Then he wrote and published several works that received both favorable reviews from literary critics and recommendations to be treated in a psychiatric clinic. In the early 60s, Robbe-Grillet switched to cinema. First as a screenwriter, then as a director. The script of the film "Last Year at Marienbad" was his first experience in cinema.
The film "Last Year at Marienbad" was filmed in 10 weeks in September-November 1960. The film premiered on 29 August 1961 at the Venice International Film Festival. The jury of the film festival, chaired by the famous Italian film critic Filippo Sacchi, awarded the film by Alain Resnais the main prize - the Golden Lion. Strictly speaking, among the 13 applicants for this award, Alain Resnais's film did not have strong competitors at this festival. Except for Akira Kurosawa's film "Yôjinbô 用心棒 (The Bodyguard)".
In 1963, Alain Resnais's film "Last Year at Marienbad", among 18 other films from different countries, was nominated for the British BAFTA Award in the category Best Foreign Language Film. The competition was much higher, it is enough to name the films "Billy Budd" by Peter Ustinov, "Jules et Jim" by François Truffaut, "The Miracle Worker" by Arthur Penn, "Hadaka no shima 裸の島 (The Naked Island)" by Kaneto Shindo, "Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly)" by Ingmar Bergman, etc. The award was awarded to the film "Lawrence of Arabia" by David Lean.
The film "Last Year at Marienbad" had no other serious festival achievements. But the film literally caused universal delight among professional film critics. Even the usually corrosive and picky Bosley Crowther from The New York Times broke out about the film with a laudatory review, which he began with the words: "...a truly extraordinary French film, which ...may grip you with a strange enchantment, it may twist your wits into a snarl, it may leave your mind and senses toddling vaguely in the regions in between. But this we can reasonably promise: when you stagger away from it, you will feel you have delighted in (or suffered) a unique and intense experience."
One of the most authoritative Russian film critics Sergey Kudryavtsev gave the film a maximum of 10 points and wrote in his review: "At the moment of its appearance, this film caused a storm of controversy, a lot of contradictory assessments - from delight to complete rejection, becoming for some time almost a household name when defining abstruse-intellectual (as in the West) or bourgeois-elitist (as in our country) cinema. ... in the world of the film, everything is relative, exists in an unknown coordinate system, with displaced concepts of space and time. Everything is ghostly and unreal, as if in the realm of the dead. The only ideal hope, a guiding ray of light in the "edge of darkness” can only be a saving memory that can rescue amnesia from a dead end... “Last Year at Marienbad" is an incomprehensibly successful insight about the transcendent cinema, where images generated by a movie camera seem to constantly materialize from an airless space and meet with the same movie images that are created again directly at the moment of projection. Everything is a movie, a reflection of reflections, a dream in a dream. And the so-called second reality becomes not just the first, but the only one that is repeated in life, depending on the frequency of views. In fact, we do not live, but exist in an eternal situation of deja vu, already seen-seen, happening every year in Marienbad or somewhere else. Cinema is a mirror in which we recognize our previous essences, other hypostases."
The guru of American film criticism, Roger Ebert, rated Alain Resnais's film with the maximum in his system 4 stars and included it in his list of "Great Movies". In his review, he gives this answer to the accusations of being clever about the film: "Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade."
However, it is impossible to discount the fact that not all film critics were imbued with high feelings about the film by Alain Resnais. For example, the famous American film critic Pauline Kael, combining the film "Last Year at Marienbad" with some films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, asks the question: "is there something new and deep in them, or are they simply empty? When they are called abstract, is that just a fancy term for empty?" And in 1978, the book "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time" was published in the United States, written by a group of American film critics. In this book, the section "Overrated Art Films" includes the film by Alain Resnais "Last year in Marienbad". By the way, Sergei Eisenstein's film "Ivan the Terrible" is listed in the same section as well.
As for the evaluation of the film by modern moviegoers, 64% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave the film ratings from 8 to 10. And 23% of users rated the film with the highest score - "ten". Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of the film Alain Resnais "Last Year at Marienbad" according to FilmGourmand was 8,129, which allowed it to take 551st Rank in the Golden Thousand.
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