You Love to See It: Last Year at Marienbad

Director Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, driven almost entirely by the stark, enigmatic visions of cinematographer Sacha Vierny and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s minimalistically elliptical script, is a glacial film on its surface. Even the few events which anchor its story about a complex and fraught affair between the vacationing elite are mired in uncertainty, none more so than the nameless couple’s sex scene. First we see the man come uninvited to her room. She has rebuffed him more than once already. He forces himself on her and, it is heavily implied, rapes her. Then, in an immediate flurry of cuts, he flies to her open arms and beatific smile, coming again and again to her bed with near-rapturous joy.

Is this the man’s fantasy after, or even during, the rape? Does he recall occasions that she wanted him, to salve his conscience now that she doesn’t? Afterward the film resumes its aimless progress, conversations winding back upon themselves, repeating in the empty corridors of Marienbad. What are we to make of this lone lightning bolt of crisis, frozen in the act of striking and not striking, at the heart of the film? It could explain the woman’s antipathy toward her would-be suitor, whose claims they’ve dallied together before she firmly rejects. Then again, perhaps the fantasy is hers, and as he rapes her she imagines herself willing, even overjoyed, in order to survive. Or perhaps she wishes he would rape her and destroy her happiness.

In all of film there’s nothing quite like this strange, mercurial scene, a whirlpool of desire, rejection, and willful self-deception cut together like glimpses of crime scene photos thrown across a desk in some grim thriller. Here eyes sparkling with unshed tears, here white feathers and a languorous caress. The man’s body looming into frame. Sex and rape, love and dissociation. The experience of it, the alienating dissonance of the scene and its hurried and repeated reworking, matters far more than ferreting some answer out of its conflicting images. It’s hard not to think of Molly Bloom remembering her English lover as she and her husband fuck at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, dozens of overlaid lattices of thought pulsing in time across the breadth of her being as, like the nameless woman in the bedroom, she says yes, and yes, and Yes.