Eschewing conventional narrative in favor of memory invocation and staccato temporality, Last Year at Marienbad manipulates the past and present to develop hauntingly tantalizing images of romance. Within the ornate halls with paintings and other fanciful fixtures lies unsettling fluctuations of memory. We flow through the hypnotic scenes of conversation and dance like outside observers trapped in a meaningless bubble, where no words are registered and no action distinguishes itself. A game is played, a hallway is traversed, men and women stand frozen in time in a display of nullity. Meanwhile, Resnais bombards us with this positively incessant plea of rememberance, calcifying these inherent idiosyncracies and metaphorically establishing it in the form of statues.
The act of rememberance all blurs together in a fit of ambiguity. There is a fate-bound momentum, propelled by the escalating fracture in time, for which her capitulation to his unnatural romantic force plays out in a dramatic totality. We see the three-pronged mirror become a representation of her internal strife, the dropping of the glass at the bar, the iteratively haunting denouement where she stands in her bedroom and holds out her arms, all powerful images from which Resnais derives meaning.
