Alain Resnais' 'Last Year at Marienbad'

"Marienbad" brought together two emerging stars who had invigorated their respective fields: Resnais, fresh off the success of "Hiroshima Mon Amour," directing a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, an originator of the nouveau roman (new novel) movement. The dynamics of this partnership are outlined in the Criterion booklet. Robbe-Grillet, in keeping with nouveau roman tenets, produced an obsessively detailed script, but Resnais found a way to put his stamp on the material.

The two men had fundamentally different movies in mind: Robbe-Grillet envisioned a jarring and fractured experience, with a dissonant soundtrack, but Resnais, with the help of gliding tracking shots and the shimmering organ score (by Francis Seyrig, Delphine's brother), created something far more lulling.

"Marienbad" was a sensation in Paris and New York, drawing comparisons to Picasso and James Joyce. But it had plenty of detractors, notably Pauline Kael, who used it in her scathing essay "The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties."

Viewed today, "Marienbad" seems like the last gasp of an old-fashioned modernism. The film might be easy to mock, but it's also hard to resist. You can detect its imprint in the death-haunted reverie of Chris Marker's "La Jetee," the maze-like structures of Peter Greenaway's puzzle-box films, the sinister corridors of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and David Lynch's "Inland Empire."

Robbe-Grillet, who died last year, earned an Oscar nomination for the "Marienbad" screenplay and went on to direct a few films, none of which approached the popularity of "Marienbad." Resnais, in his autumnal years, has grown more wistful and developed a lighter touch.

Kino has just released a DVD set of four of his '80s films. His latest, "Wild Grass," was a highlight of last month's Cannes Film Festival. At 87, Resnais remains not just a working filmmaker but a wondrously unpredictable one.

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