(I’ve just upgraded this movie to my recommendations. I watched it with my wife and she liked it, so my hesitancy at the end of this review is nullified)
What a strange movie. The camera pans over a ornate house filled with puppet characters who are never given dialogue worth noting. At least twice I missed dialogue because I didn’t read the subtitles, but it didn’t mar the movie. This may have been because none of the dialogue has any import, or because what I missed had been said a dozen times already, or because I didn’t miss the lines at all, but only thought I must have.
For all the oddity of the movie, it was fascinating. It is like a who done it where the who is known and the it is questioned. What was done, or left undone? Nabokov criticized Dostoevsky and claimed that people who loved his novels mistook vacuity for mystery. That might be the case here, but it doesn’t seem to matter since you are more interested in seeing something, anything, rather than the deceitful story you are telling and hoping you yourself might believe.
This film is violent in the way Scorsese’s ‘The Age of Innocence’ is. The narrator repeats again and again the same few lines and is repulsed by the girl, but she does begin to yield and a story and a pass do being to emerge in spite of every effort to reject them. Where Scorsese pits his characters against the fixed rules of society, Last Year at Marienbad pits our desire to know what is what against a desire to repress the unseemly in our past.
I thought this movie was fascinating, but wouldn’t recommend it because I couldn’t think of anyone who I would recommend it to. On second thought and third viewing, I know it is a great movie. Watch it in one sitting without distraction and you will find yourself in an odd, but not unpleasant, place where the only desire is to understand an obscure film.
Great Catholic Movies 