Don’t I know you from somewhere? X asks A. Don’t you remember last year at Marienbad? X is a nameless “stranger” played by Giorgio Albertazzi, and A is a nameless “woman” played by Delphine Seyrig. The action in 1961’s “Last Year at Marienbad” is mostly X’s insisting that A recall their past love. Either he’s delusional or she’s in denial. Or something else is askew in this luxurious black-and-white pageant of deluxe inertia. Director Alain Resnais composes avant-garde ambiguity that is both rapturous and monstrous. Cinematographer Sacha Vierny keeps the camera in almost perpetual motion, as he tracks through a palatial hotel populated with elegantly outfitted ladies and gentlemen. Designer Coco dressed some of them. Their alabaster demeanors and studied disengagement suggest Euro-zombies. Adolfo Bioy Casare’s “The Invention of Morel” supposedly inspired Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay. In that 1940 science-fiction novella, an inventor uses hologram-like projectors to preserve on a loop his swell circle on an island. 93m. (Bill Stamets)
Talking Screens, December 16-22, 2022: "All The Beauty and The Bloodshed" is One of the Year's Finest | "Bardo" is a Small Story Told on an… "Avatar: The Way of Water," "All The Beauty and The Bloodshed," "The Volcano: Rescue From Whakaari" and "Bardo." PLUS: Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar," Andersson's "About Endlessless"; FACETS' "Holiday Detour" series; Chicago filmmaker-in-residence Daniel Nearing's "Sister Carrie" with an orchestra at Siskel; "The Thirty-Ninth Christmas Sing-A-Long & Double Feature" at the Music Box and Music Box Of Horrors and Shudder pull…
