Last Year at Marienbad [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the movie is a riddle of seduction, a mercurial enigma darting between a present and past which may not even exist, let alone converge. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as an unnamed sophisticate attempting to convince a similarly nameless woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met and were romantically involved a year ago in the same enormous, baroque European hotel. In the end, it hardly matters -- they're not characters so much as pawns anyway. Hypnotically dreamlike, Last Year at Marienbad is a surrealist parody of Hollywood melodrama, a high-fashion romance with a dark, alien underbelly. According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence -- the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: A
• Number of Discs: 1
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 (Cinemascope)
• Screen: Black and White
• Features:
  • Audio interview with Resnais
  • Documentary on the making of DLast Year at Marienbad, featuring interviews with many of Resnais' collaborators
  • Video interview with film scholar Ginette Vincendeau on the history of the film and its many mysteries
  • Two short documentaries by Resnais: Toute la memoire du monde (1956) and Le chant du styrene (1958)
  • Original theatrical trailer and Rialto's rerelease trailer

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Nominated Best Original Screenplay - 1962 (Alain Robbe-Grillet)

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Nominated Best Film - Any Source - 1962 (Alain Resnais)

• Venice International Film Festival

•     Won Golden Lion - 1961 (Alain Resnais)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Delphine Seyrig - A
       Giorgio Albertazzi - X
       Sacha Pitoeff - M
       Francoise Spira
       Francoise Bertin

• Director:

  Alain Resnais

• Producer:

  Raymond Froment, Pierre Courau

• Screenwriter:

  Alain Robbe-Grillet

• Cinematographer:

  Sacha Vierny

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  André Girard

• Composer (Music Score):

  Francis Seyrig

• Editor:

  Henri Colpi, Jasmine Chasney

• Production Designer:

  Jacques Saulnier

• Set Designer:

  Georges Glon

• Costume Designer:

  Bernard Evein

• Makeup:

  Alexandre Marcus

REVIEW:

• One of the most enigmatic and distinctive movies ever made, this collaboration of director Alain Resnais with leading French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet has confounded and intrigued audiences since it first led the wave of European art movies in the early 1960s. Wandering through and around the story of a mysterious love triangle as it wanders through and around its hotel setting, the film can be interpreted, among other possibilities, as a parody of Hollywood romantic melodramas; as an effort to find a new way to tell a romantic melodrama, free of the cliches imposed by Hollywood; as a mystery, whose answer is finally unresolved and perhaps unresolvable; as, therefore, a Rashomon-like examination of the uncertainty of truth; as a philosophical inquiry into truth, time, memory, and personal identity; as a purely sensual melange of shapes and sounds -- grand architecture, striking compositions, and strange soundtrack elements; as a self-reflexive examination of cinema itself; or as a game, like the logarithm game at the center of the story, played by the filmmakers with the audience. Whatever interpretation(s) one favors, this is, for better or for worse, an unforgettable and unique movie, a high-water mark of postwar European art cinema. ~ Leo Charney, Rovi