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Last year at marienbad4/8/2023 ![]() ![]() Anybody can analyze this film in a Marxist, feminist, Freudian, Christian, Taoist, Buddhist, or even Existentialist framework. I felt like Resnais wasn't compelling me towards a larger answer. While watching The Last Year at Marienbad, I never felt like there was a "larger" point to get. But it never ONCE descends to the slippery realms of pretentiousness. It has the air of something bigger than itself, I'll give you that. It can be comprehended and understood, but often too late, and to no advantage over others. I see this as a metaphor for both understanding the film and therefore 'existence'. But when you first come across it - as many do when they see it in this film - they lose, as it is not understood. ![]() Nim, once you understand it, is quite easy to win. A good criticism of this approach to literature (and I suppose film) is given by Saul Bellow in his Nobel Speech:įor me, the key to understanding the film (at least conceptually), is in the eerie scenes where the 'character' plays the game 'nim'. This is part of how Marienbad works - they are not 'characters', but what he would call 'entities'. You say you love the 'characters', but Robbe-Grillet would argue that such a thing no longer exists. If you're interested in learning more about Robbe-Grillet, I suggest you read his book 'For a New Novel' (Pour un Nouveau Roman), which highlights his approach to fiction. This topic came up, surprisingly enough, in r/movies recently. Any fans of this movie on r/flicks? Am I being too safe with my interpretation? What's your take on it? Any thoughts are welcome. A simple story, told in a challenging way through Resnais' nonlinear storytelling and surrealism. Maybe the happenings are not crazy - the camera is. What matters, though, is that he convinced her. I'm not sure if they ever met before, and in a way, it almost doesn't seem to matter. This one, though, I'm rather unsure about. I'm not sure if I agree with any of these - it seems that when surrealism is involved, most people tend to take it a bit too literally, which depending on the film, might not be right. It seems like most people think they were all ghosts, or in Hell, or it was psychoanalysis and X was A's therapist trying to get some traumatic memory out of her, that X raped and/or killed A, that it was all a dream, or it's a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, or a time loop, or a meta film. After I watched it, I looked around for interpretations. Just like The Shining (a film that must've been inspired by it), it can be appreciated just like a mood piece, however, I feel it's too carefully crafted to not make any sense. He did the same with Mulholland Drive, so it might just be his way of saying a movie is a masterpiece. My insomniac dad joined in at 20 minutes of film and left some 15 minutes later mumbling something like "it's fucking weird". Finished it half an hour ago, terrific film. ![]()
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