Critic’s Choice: ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ returns to seduce and confound us anew
The shimmering modernist puzzle-box that is “Last Year at Marienbad” returns to Los Angeles theaters this week in a new digital 4K restoration courtesy of Rialto Pictures. And because this is a picture that invites all manner of interpretive possibilities, I’m tempted to imagine an alternate 2019 that greeted Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s singularly stylish enigma with the passion it deserves, perhaps even with some of the intense fervor that turned it into an art-house sensation in 1961.
Really, what better film to set off a fresh avalanche of competing hot takes than “Marienbad,” long hailed as a masterpiece by many but witheringly dismissed by Pauline Kael as “Sleeping Beauty of the International Set”? What would the culture make of its famous nonstory about a man and a woman arguing about a putative romantic encounter that could be construed as seduction or rape? I do not mean to reduce or confine “Marienbad” to the present moment; its ravishing surfaces, somehow both diamond-hard and evanescent, exist gloriously outside of time. It’s a movie to see now and ponder forever.
------------
‘Last Year at Marienbad’
In French with English subtitles
Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Playing: Starts July 12, Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena, and Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles
Only good movies
Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
