Last week we discussed 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that many viewers find baffling but that can be figured out. Now we come to Last Year at Marienbad, a film that is also hard to grasp -- but don't worry about it, because it's not supposed to be comprehensible. Whew. That's a relief. But if its puzzling story is meaningless, what's the big deal about the movie? What did it do that was so important? Let's put on our Coco Chanel gowns and examine it. The praise: The film's screenplay was nominated for an Oscar (it lost to another foreign-language film, Divorce Italian Style) and won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. It is frequently cited by critics as one of the most influential art films ever made.The context: Since Last Year at Marienbad is a French film released in 1961, and since you have been paying very close attention to previous editions of "What's the Big Deal?," you might suppose that the film and its director, Alain Resnais, were part of the French New Wave. But while Resnais had New Wave ties -- his 1959 breakthrough film, Hiroshima mon amour, helped launch the movement -- Last Year at Marienbad has only a little in common with movies like Breathless and Jules & Jim. The New Wave films tended to have a low-budget, do-it-yourself aesthetic, with handheld cameras and semi-improvised scenarios. Marienbad, on the other hand, is tightly scripted and features stunningly elegant cinematography. It's vastly more experimental -- i.e., hard to follow -- than the New Wave movies, which, while avant-garde, usually at least made some kind of narrative sense.Born in 1922, Resnais started his career making documentary shorts that combined journalism with artistic expression. His Oscar-winning Van Gogh (1948), for example, told the artist's life story through his paintings, along with music and narration. His first fictional feature, Hiroshima mon amour, told a love story against the backdrop of the atomic bomb. Its main characters were nameless; it addressed themes of memory and forgetfulness; and it used flashbacks in an innovative way -- all elements of Last Year at Marienbad, too. The movie: The setting is a sumptuous, elegant chateau in Europe, where wealthy people go to stand around and drink and play games and be fancy. A handsome man known only as X (Giorgio Albertazzi) tells a beautiful woman known only as A (Delphine Seyrig) that they met a year earlier and had an affair. She says she does not remember. She may be lying, or she may not remember, or it may not have happened, or it may be that none of this is happening now, and the serious-looking man who may or may not be her husband (Sacha Pitoëff) may or may not know what did or did not happen. What it influenced: Even if you haven't seen Last Year at Marienbad, you've probably seen -- and made fun of -- one of the major things inspired by it: the Calvin Klein Obsession perfume commercials from the 1980s. Here's the original French trailer for Marienbad:And here's one of those Obsession ads:The perfume commercials were probably imitating "artsy European films" in general -- but the view of what "artsy European films" were like came primarily from Marienbad and Fellini's 8 1/2. The intentionally unrealistic staging, the distinctive posing of the actors, the poetic and repetitious narration: all of this has been parodied many, many times. It's easy to see why; what's less easy to see, maybe, is why it was effective when Resnais did it.Stanley Kubrick may have had Marienbad's ornate rooms in mind when he dropped an astronaut into one in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was almost certainly remembering the long, fluid tracking shots through endless hotel corridors when he made The Shining. The video for Blur's song "To the End" (embedding disabled, but you can watch it here) re-creates Marienbad with loving attention to detail. Films like Vanilla Sky, The Others, and Memento deal with dreams and unreliable memories, and the fractured, non-linear way the movies convey that uncertainty can be traced to Marienbad. The whole point of the movie was not to tell a story but to capture a feeling. Resnais wanted to show, in movie form, what the human thought process is like. What to look for: I'll tell you what not to look for: an explanation of what actually happened to these characters. There isn't one. You can form theories or impressions of the "truth," but there is no definitive answer. Neither the screenwriter nor the director intended for there to be one. And it's that element -- the intention -- that makes all the difference.It's common enough to see a movie that is obtuse and cryptic, where you can tell you're supposed to be able to figure out what's going on and you simply cannot. Such movies, like riddles, are frustrating at first, then immensely satisfying when everything finally "clicks" and you get it. Last Year at Marienbad may appear to be such a film. It may seem like you ought to be able to puzzle out the particulars: what really did happen a year ago, what really is happening now, who these people really are, and so forth. We expect our baffling movies to have answers. The trick with Marienbad is not to expect that. Why? Because Resnais and his writer, the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, did not intend for the film to work in that manner. As Mark Polizzotti wrote for Criterion, "Both Resnais and Robbe-Grillet have repeatedly stressed the very simple key to understanding and enjoying the work: just watch it. Let yourself be carried along by the music, the rhythms of Albertazzi's slightly stagy voice-over, the sinuosity of the tracking shots down the grand hotel corridors." He says Marienbad is only a "difficult" movie "if we try to impose a traditionally logical and chronological structure on the flow of sounds and images" -- in other words, if we expect it to do the things most movies do.Obviously, no one's going to blame you for expecting a movie to function in approximately the same way that most movies function. It's not like Last Year at Marienbad comes with a label: "CAUTION: This story does not make sense, and it never will." Let's say you're visiting some rich people who own a lot of nice furniture and art. As you go to sit in an unusually ornate chair, the host stops you: That's actually a piece of art, he says. The artist painstakingly crafted it to look like an antique wooden chair, but he made it with modern, lightweight materials, and it would break if anyone actually sat in it. (Not just you, fatty. Anyone.) Your first reaction might be that it is stupid to make something that looks like a chair but doesn't serve a chair's function. Upon further reflection, though, you can appreciate the intricate patterns and designs, the skill of the artist in creating it. Sure, it fails as a chair. It also fails as a bathtub, a motorcycle, and a chalkboard. But as a piece of art -- which is the only thing it was intended to be in the first place -- it may very well succeed.Last Year at Marienbad is that art-chair. It may appear on the same shelves as the "normal" movies (i.e., the ones whose stories are linear and decipherable), but it wasn't created with the same purpose in mind. So what purpose was it created for? Here's what Resnais himself told an interviewer in the September 1961 issue of Cahiers du Cinema:

Film is for me an attempt, still very rough and very primitive, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism. ... I find that once you descend into the subconscious, an emotion can be born. ... I believe that in life we do not think chronologically, our decisions never correspond to an ordered logic. We all have images, things that determine us which are not a logical succession of actions that would normally develop perfectly in a chain. It seems intriguing to me to explore this universe. (Quoted in Haim Callev's The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais, translated by Callev.)

Basically, Resnais wanted to capture how people think. The specific thoughts aren't the point; it's the mental process itself that he sought to portray. That's why people in Last Year at Marienbad suddenly flit from one time and place to another, why scenes are different each time they're replayed, why people and events seem to be in two places at once. That's how our dreams work, and even how our conscious minds work, too. While we can only hold one thought at a time, we can hold a series of thoughts in so rapid a succession that it feels like we're thinking of many things at once. Marienbad is an attempt to capture on film something that is inherently unfilmable: what it feels like to think. When the film was rereleased in 2008, Mark Harris wrote a piece in the New York Times claiming that it was precisely the movie's weirdness that made it appealing in the early 1960s:

To revisit Marienbad today is to glimpse a vanished moment when American audiences drank in European films not because they were universal or "relatable," but for their otherness, their impenetrability, their defiant contrast to the simplistic and elephantine Technicolor epics that much of Hollywood was then embracing.

He goes on to describe the film's impact in 1962:

As the movie opened in other cities, the syndicated columnist Inez Robb confirmed its status as a cultural totem for cocktail hour, writing, "The surest way to get a party off the pad and into orbit this season is to ask, 'And how did you like Last Year at Marienbad?"

Does that make you think of Inception? (The word "totem" is even coincidentally used.) As I write this, Christopher Nolan's film -- which owes a lot to his earlier Memento, and thus also to Last Year at Marienbad -- is the one enlivening conversations and inviting repeat viewings. What does it mean? What really happened? What did you think of it? Like Marienbad, it makes us think about the untrustworthiness of dreams and memories. But unlike Marienbad, Inception's story is meant to be figure-out-able; it's not "merely" an artistic expression. As influential as Marienbad was, few filmmakers have tried to imitate its non-narrative plunge into stream-of-consciousness, at least not at length. (A sequence here and there, sure, but not an entire film.) What's the big deal: You can debate whether Resnais' efforts to depict the workings of the human mind were successful, but there's no question the very attempt was groundbreaking. For more than 50 years film had been primarily a storytelling medium. Now Resnais was using it for something else. Since then, non-linear stories, unreliable narrators, and fractured memories have become common, and the European art film -- of which Marienbad is a prime example -- has influenced the way we look at movies. Further reading: For more background, here's a basic biography of Resnais. Here is Bosley Crowther's original review from the New York Times, and Roger Ebert's 1999 essay. * * * *Eric D. Snider (website) knows what you did last summer at Marienbad.