The Last Year at Marienbad

Alright, right off the bat I'm going to be honest... I slept through about half of this movie. There was something about the warm room, repetitive language and fuzzy subtitles that just lulled me right to sleep. What I can say is that when I woke up and saw tid bits I felt like I had never even fallen asleep. It seemed like I had not missed a thing and I was just as confused as I had been when I was watching the film in the beginning of class completely awake.

One thing I did take away from my sporadic moments of viewing was the dream-like state of this film. The entire story seemed like something out of a dream. I felt like it was X dreaming up something he'd like to happen, but most people can't control their dreams, so A wasn't really going along with his dream and outside forces were interrupting as well. I really liked what Sarah said in class about X being at the hotel last year and seeing A, but never approaching her so he is sort of playing out the scenario he wished had happened before. For me it seemed like A was kind of a shot of reality in the crazy mixed up mind of X. Her constant refusal to his insistence about knowing her and his crazy back story about him brought forth the idea that what X was dreaming probably never happened. I also liked the idea about the garden's maze and the endless maze of hallways in the hotel being compared to X's mind and the endless gauntlet of story-telling he was leading A through. It was sort of like if A could make it through and not break and accept X's skewed vision of reality she would get to return to the "real world."

The repetition of dialogue really adds to that dream-like feel as well. The whole repetitiveness of the whole film makes it feel even more dream like. It gives you that feeling of being stuck in one place and being unable to move forward in any sense. This also makes it difficult for the audience to connect to any of the characters or the story. A and X are both pretty strange throughout the whole film and you can't really make any sort of connection to either of them. I liked an idea someone brought up in class about the characters being like ghosts who just repeat the same action over and over again, I felt like that really fit in this movie.

Another idea that I liked that came up in class had to do with the reading and the idea of solipsism, or the idea of thinking yourself is the only thing that is real. This also ties into Descarte's "I think therefore I am" idea, which means if I can form thoughts then I must be real. These ideas do make your own existence concrete, but it pretty much leaves everyone else out in the cold. Sure you're reassuring yourself in the fact that you must be real, but that doesn't speak for everyone else in your life. Does that mean that everyone around you is non-existent? I'm pretty sure if you're focusing so much on your own reality that you're going to have trouble relating to anyone else and I think this ties into X's obsession with A. He so badly wants to confirm A's existence, but no matter how much he slams the idea into his head and she won't simply tell him if she's real or not and she doesn't really give him any hints.

I really like the setting for this movie. The formality and grandeur of the hotel and grounds really makes a sharp contrast with the dream-like quality of it all. The formality kind of plays on the who idea of these people who are sort of insane. Especially when you're looking at the people who aren't the main characters. They are dressed so perfectly and doing all of these fancy things, but they're really quite odd in the way they speak and act. It goes the same for X and A. They are both really, really bizarre, but they look good doing it. They are also speaking in the formal form of French the entirety of the movie, but about super informal things, which adds another weird element to it all.