A Reaction to Last Year At Marienbad

Two experiences from my own life come to mind after viewing this film.  One lasted only a night.  The other, nearly two years.

Before I moved to Philadelphia, just over ten years ago, I lived in an art deco apartment building in Harrisburg.  Such times are surely gone when one could live in a downtown area anywhere in America in a beautiful, historic building for an affordable rent.  Although I believe the building was near fully occupied, it always seemed to have a quality of feeling empty.  I rarely crossed paths with my neighbors.  The austere, yet elegant lobby was sparsely adorned with a tasteful array of furnishings that matched the period of the structure.  Dominant among these furnishings was a massive and ornately carved grandfather clock.  There was a romantic story attached to the clock about a couple of world travelers who lived in the building long ago and brought it back with them from a European trip, only to discover it was too large to fit in their apartment despite the twelve-foot high ceilings.  Or were they fourteen-foot high ceilings?  At night a tall, heavy-browed man who spoke in a soft, low voice attended the lobby.  He was friendly and kind, yet also dark and mysterious.  He manned the desk till three or four in the morning.  I don’t really know why.  In the brown and beige tiled upper hallways it seemed to always be night, or at least to always be the same time.  At the end of one of the corridors lived an antique dealer who had decorated the hall outside of his apartment with mirrors and end tables topped with marble busts.  Turning the corner to face this scene was like walking into a dream.

The other scenario took place on a mid-western family vacation the summer after I graduated from high school.  It was a night or two before end of our vacation, which had lasted for sixteen or so days.  We spent one night in a humongous ski lodge while passing through somewhere in Colorado.   Since it was summer, we were practically the only guests in this cavernous establishment.  One of my high school friends accompanied my family and I on this trip.  I remember being in the lounge late at night.  There was a fully equipped bar, but no bartender.  I think there may have been a grand piano there as well.  My friend and I were sitting on stools at a table that doubled as a large chessboard and playing chess with oversized game pieces.  I remember thinking about how larger than life the experience felt at the time.  As we were leaving the next morning we crossed paths with another family in the hall and I felt like I’d just seen a family of ghosts.

At times like these I felt like my life was stylized, as if in a movie.  The only thing more surreal and fantastic than the plots that actually unfolded in these iconic settings is the manner in which these dramatic scenes and the feelings attached to them live on in my memories.  It is due to this character of memory that Last Year At Marienbad evokes these very specific feelings of time and place.

In this lavish estate, surrounded by the ornamentation of another century, style is elevated to the hilt.  The imagination is captured.  The stage is set for an unforgettable experience.  It is from here that we enter the territory where memories intersect and merge with reality.  Marienbad skews the picture further.  Are we viewing an obsessive fantasy or did this scene really take place last year at Marienbad?  Or was it perhaps at Karlstadt or somewhere else entirely different?  The recollections of our characters, X and A, seem to vary dramatically.  But as the plot unfolds, are their alternate takes on the past, as well as their present day circumstance, moving closer together or remaining firmly entrenched in separate worlds?  Marienbad offers us little in the way of answers, only a myriad of possibilities.  But it is somehow this nebulous of questions and uncertainty that draws us into a crystal clear moment where we are held as enraptured captives.   A moment, the feeling of which, I for one, will never forget.

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