Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais's second feature, written by the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. At a grand hotel somewhere in Europe, a man the screenplay calls X (Giorgio Albertazzi) tells a woman called A (Delphine Seyrig) that they met last year, fell in love and agreed to leave together. She denies it. M (Sacha Pitoëff), who may be her husband, beats X at the game of Nim every time they play.

The building is the main subject. Scenes come back with their details changed: her remembered bedroom is bare in one version and ornate in another, and the gardens are a maze of shrubs one time and straight formal alleys the next. The voice-over and the images often disagree.

Resnais went to Germany looking for a baroque hotel. "We were very excited by the châteaux of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg, outside Munich," he recalled in Peter Cowie's account for Criterion, and he sent Robbe-Grillet photographs of rooms and gardens to choose from. Mark Polizzotti writes that the film was shot at three palaces, none of them in Marienbad, which is how the hotel's plan can change from scene to scene.

Sacha Vierny shot it in 2.35:1 widescreen, the first time Resnais used the format for a feature. Jacques Saulnier designed it, and Coco Chanel and Bernard Evein did the costumes. The organ score is by Francis Seyrig, Delphine Seyrig's brother, chosen after Olivier Messiaen turned the film down.