All Things to All Men

Last Year at Marienbad (Astor), written by Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the prophet of The New Dehumanism that is currently fashionable in French letters, and directed by Alain Resnais, the 39-year-old Frenchman who made Hiroshima, Mon Amour (TIME, May 16, 1960), has been bruited about Europe as a masterpiece of the cinema of ideas. It won the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival, and went on to do a brisk business all over the continent. Released now in the U.S., it promises to become the intellectual sensation of the cinema year, and to judge from pre-release excitement it is going to make money too.

Customers who expect to be entertained are going to be painfully disappointed.

Marienbad is not a movie in the publicly accepted sense of the word; it is an enigma, the most monstrously elaborate enigma ever conceived in terms of cinema.

As such, it is not meant to be seen but to be solved. However, to Resnais' riddle there is not, helas, just one solution; there is an infinite series of solutions, and some of them suppose an esthetic, metaphysical, and even mathematical sophistication that few in any audience possess.

-On the face of it, Marienbad tells the story of a seduction--Resnais prefers to call it a "persuasion"--that transpires in what Robbe-Grillet calls "a grand hotel, a sort of international palace, immense, baroque, with a decor at once sumptuous and icy: a universe of columns, marbles, gilded panels, statues, servants in rigid attitudes; a clientele rich, polished, anonymous, unemployed. Seriously but without passion they play society's inevitable games--cards, dancing, vacant conversation, pistol-shooting. Inside this closed and stifling world, people and things alike seem caught in an enchantment.'' Among the enchanted inhabitants of the palace are a beautiful young woman (Delphine Seyrig), a man (Sacha Pitoeff) who is "perhaps her husband,'' and another man (Giorgio Albertazzi), who pursues her passionately and persuades her finally to go away with him.

A simple story. But in Resnais' hands the love affair develops into a dramatic dialogue of appearance and reality in the manner of Luigi Pirandello. As the film begins, the seducer with seeming sincerity reminds the young woman that they have met before. With seeming sincerity she says she cannot remember when. Why, it was only a year ago, he says reproachfully, and at this very same spa--or was it at Friedrichsbad? Or was it at Marienbad? Wherever it was, they met and--can she really have forgotten?--fell in love. She says he must be joking. He insists he isn't, and begins to remind her of things he says they said, things he says they did. She can't remember the events he describes, or says she can't. Is she lying? Is he lying? Are both of them telling the truth? Has he simply confused her with another girl? Has she simply for gotten the affair? Whatever the case, he continues to fill her mind with images that slowly come to seem more real than the everyday reality of her life, that slowly persuade her to imagine they were really in love -- or perhaps persuade her to remember they were really in love. Does it matter which? What is reality, if not what one thinks it is? Resnais finds an abstruse answer to his question. Reality, he suggests, is a Pla tonic allegory, in which human experiences are merely the image and shadow of divine things, in which human lives, like crystals, fulfill a cosmic lattice. Specifically. Resnais suggests that hero and heroine represent The Eternal Masculine and The Eternal Feminine, which stand impersonal in stone and larger than life in the palace garden. Generally, he seems to be saying that all men and women live, or can live, more than merely personal lives, that all lives potentially contain, as these two lives contain, elements of legend --the experience of the labyrinth, a struggle between Death and the Maiden, a sleeping beauty and an awakening prince.

- These quasi-mythological experiences, Resnais suggests, constitute a cure for the fashionable malady of unbeing, and to elucidate them he has instigated an Einsteinian revolution of cinema. He applies the principle of relativity to the art of film, as Picasso applied it to painting and Schoenberg to music. The result is true cubistic cinema, in which reality is "dismantled," as Resnais puts it, and reassembled in such a way that it seems to be experienced in every aspect simultaneously -- one French critic describes the result as "total cinema." To begin with, Resnais annihilates time by chopping his story into short scenes--the shortest of them lasts less than a tenth of a second--and shuffling the scenes so thoroughly that no sense of chronological continuity, no sense of story remains.

From first frame to last, the film goes bouncing like a pingpong ball in a washing machine through four kinds of time: future, past, present, conditional.

In the conditional tense Resnais shows events that might have happened, but didn't; events imagined in daydreams or potentiated by lies. Well and good, but which scenes are real and which imaginary? No way of knowing. Do things that happen in the future affect things that happen in the past? They seem to, but the spectator seldom has a definite clue. Indeed, he has only the tenuous clue of light and costume changes to tell him when he is watching a flashback, when a flash-forward.

To confound confusion further, Resnais with consistent cubism multiplies his point of view as he relativizes time. Some scenes take place in the woman's mind, some in the lover's; some in neither, some in both at once; some even seem to take place in the man-who-may-be-her-husband's mind. Resnais' people are people without point of view, without personality: objects not subjects, breathing furniture, events of merely statistical interest.

And his world is a world without time, without history or possibility: music at stillstand, a self-erasing poem. Meticulously, the artist has attempted to create an unstructured reality that, like a Rorschach blot, invites the beholder to build into it his own reality, to enhance it with his personal interpretation. He has attempted to create a miraculous object that is all things to all men.

- Has he succeeded? Partly. Even moviegoers who dislike the picture will feel irritably impelled to discuss, to analyze, to interpret what it means. Even those who find high baroque as gay as Resnais finds it "lugubre," will admit that in his film the glorious old palace--actually a combination of three German palaces: Nymphenburg, Schleissheim and Oranienburg--glows like a lotus in the moonlight.

Even those who groan at the drone of the narrator's tone will admit that his words are often poetry ("We live here, side by side, like two coffins buried in a frozen garden"). Even those who find the film cluttered with technique will admit that the technique is masterful.

Nevertheless, there is one trick that Director Resnais. with all his perspicacity, has failed to bring off: the trick of holding the spectator's attention. Watching this movie is like listening to 93 consecutive minutes of twelve-tone music: the effort exhausts, what at first is hypnotic at last is soporific. If time is a device to prevent everything from happening at once, what is needed in Marienbad is a device to prevent nothing from happening at once. And even those who escape exhaustion will not escape the suspicion that the luminous and subtle beauty of Resnais' film, like the image in a child's teleidoscope, is actually just an immensely intricate refraction of--a bit of fluff?

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