Letztes Jahr in Marienbad (1961)

Letztes Jahr in Marienbad: Directed by Alain Resnais. With Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff, Françoise Bertin. In a strange and isolated chateau, a man becomes acquainted with a woman and insists that they have met before.

“Scenes at a European spa unfold while a manu0026#39;s mind tries to recollect a love affair of the past season. In one of the most deeply psychological films I have seen, memory itself seems to be the protagonist — or is it the villain? What plot there is simply provides the material for a meditation on the uncertainty of knowing. The accomplishment of _Last Year at Marienbad_ is to make this point convincingly even in the case of that which one would not expect a man to have difficulty remembering: a sexual involvement and loss. It does so by a hypnotic combination of wheeling, dreamlike images of the resortu0026#39;s architecture and grounds, together with the incantatory, obsessive, recurrent tone of the narrative voice over. In doing this it also transforms a place where people go to be waited on and to play, into a labyrinth haunted by unsmiling shades, where remembering is both impossible and necessary.”