Last Year at Marienbad
All actors and roles (10)
All team (41)
Short description
In an opulent European hotel, a man approaches a woman and insists they met a year earlier at the same place, where she promised to leave with him. She has no memory of any such encounter and treats his account as invention. He keeps returning to fragments of that supposed past, and his certainty gradually unsettles her, while the other man accompanying her remains largely unaware of what is passing between them. Whether the meeting ever happened stays unresolved.
Alain Resnais directed the film, the third in the chronology of his features listed here, after Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay, with Adolfo Bioy Casares also credited; Anatole Dauman, Pierre Courau and Raymond Froment produced. Delphine Seyrig plays the woman, Giorgio Albertazzi the man pressing his case, and Sacha Pitoëff the husband. The film runs 95 minutes.
Released in 1961, it is regarded as a landmark of its era's filmmaking. On IMDb it holds 7.6/10 from around 27,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.4/10 from roughly 554 votes. A critics' rating of 8.6/10 from 58 reviews places professional assessment notably higher than the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Despite the fact that in his foreword to the published screenplay, Alain Robbe-Grillet assures us that the city of Marienbad never existed on the map, it does exist. It is the spa town of Mariánské Lázně in the Czech Republic (Mariánské Lázně), its German name being Marienbad.
- The film was shot in Paris.
- Filming took place over ten weeks from September to November 1960. The interiors and gardens of the Schleissheim, Nymphenburg, and Amalienburg palaces in Munich and its surroundings were used for filming. Additional interior scenes were shot in the pavilions of the "Photosonore-Marinier-Simon" studio in Paris.
- The most famous shot in the film is the view of the park that opens up to the characters as they leave the hotel: people stand motionless on a wide path running through the park, casting long shadows, while neither the trees nor the statues cast any shadows. The filming took place on a bright sunny day, and to create this surreal effect, the shadows of the people were simply painted on the ground.
- The film's visuals and characters were used in the music video "To The End" (1994) by the British band "Blur". The video features reshot scenes from Alain Resnais' film, accompanied by absurd English subtitles. Blur vocalist Damon Albarn played the role of X in the music video.
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