Rating of
4/4
The Best Film of its Kind
SIngli6 - wrote on 03/20/22
This labyrinthine obfuscation of a movie is as close to perfection as films get. Throughout all of its madness there is still a very clear sense of character development and discovery, and while there are myriad interpretations to just about every aspect of the film's baroque nonsense of a story, it doesn't feel exclusively designed for incoherence. It manages to be something malleable to the eyes of its beholders while seeming concrete to the individual beholder. This isn't a David Lynch film, where part of the fun is to just accept the meaning is unattainable. Here, the meaning is attainable and it is irrefutable, even if only for one person.
I for one firmly believe this is The Woman's story, and that the man is a dead lover from her last year at Marienbad who raped her before dying by way of being crushed by a stone railing. She's in a loveless marriage and part of her remembers the best of her dead lover, but the trauma of that assault obscures her memory and can only be re-awakened by the recollections of the luxurious and foreboding hotel that envelopes her. So certain am I in that reading that if Alain Resnais himself came back from the dead and told me I was a complete moron, I'd still stand by it.
Anyway, God I love the cinematography so much.
