Every aspect of the narrative – time, images, the nature of the facts told, characters and one’s self – is challenged from the beginning to the end.
Without even realizing it, the viewer finds himself in the protagonist’s shoes, in a tangled continuum from which he has no way out. From this comes a temporal, psychic and visual disorientation. The only concrete foothold in this narrative journey, which moves between different temporal and spatial passages, is the hotel-labyrinth. A non-place in which we forcibly advance, step back and re-think.
Time is presented by Resnais as a labyrinth. It is no coincidence that this image returns in the film several times, for example on the wall of a corridor or in a painting representing a garden with symmetrical lines, in which shrubs and bushes are arranged in such a way as to reproduce, precisely, a labyrinth. Or again, in the continuous repetition of parts of the script, untied from the staged images, to form the eternal return of a fragmented and disoriented memory.
The dialogues, indeed, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, inspired by Casares’ novel “The Invention of Morel”, are reinterpreted at will by the director’s camera, which relentlessly seeks to unravel the mystery that lurks in that place, those statues and that garden.
The style and progression of the film are also decisive in fully reflecting the theme: as Colonel states, it is as if ” the surface of reality or the timeline followed the structure of a labyrinth and this constituted a place that is never closed, of a continuous passage, the moving on beyond that is always at once a return or a circular conversion.”
Through metaphysical vertigo, the film twists in on itself and turns out to be increasingly intriguing and fascinating minute by minute.
To grasp the scope of the staging we need only to look at the first few minutes. Already in them Resnais throws us into another dimension by showing us the walls, stucco and carpets of “this immense, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where endless corridors succeed other corridors”.
Even the choice, therefore, of an interior is not entirely coincidental. What is being told is something that happened “outside” the scene, both temporally and physically, but what results is rather a “in here.”
Graham states that “we are increasingly dependent, in our lives, on complex remote systems; and interruptions and deactivations, even minor, of these systems can have enormous cascading effects on life”.
This is all staged in “Last Year at Marienbad“: a formidable reflection on the deceptive truth of memory.