Last Year at Marienbad

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’s epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has puzzled appreciative viewers for decades. Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a radical master of the New Novel, this surreal fever dream gorgeously fuses timelines while telling the ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its haunting scope and confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun, sudden appearances and disappearances) Resnais’s investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.