352. review: Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet

After my review of the brilliant Bava horror 'Lisa and the Devil’ (1973), Quiller pointed out to me that many of the film's motifs could be traced back to 'Last Year at Marienbad' (1961), and how right he is! As if the many literal Dostoyevsky quotes and Alice in Wonderland references (see Cineanalyst's review) weren't enough of a metatext, the blurring of the line between the living and the dead in the maze of puppets & representations, the purgatory-like haunted castle that Lisa temporarily inhabits, and the love thread could be a specific reference to Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais' complex work.

Resnais’s film is a cinematic enigma, a haunting puzzle that blurs the boundaries between memory and fantasy, reality and illusion, life and death. Set in a grand, rococo chateau-hotel, the film follows a man, known as X., as he tries to convince a woman, A., that they met the previous year, possibly at Marienbad, and had an affair. A. denies any memory of the encounter, or remains ambivalent, while another man, M., who may be her husband or lover, watches the proceedings with an air of detached control. The film is deliberately vague, refusing to give clear answers, instead drawing the viewer into its labyrinthine structure, where time, memory and identity become as fluid and unstable as the hotel itself. It is hard to think of anything other than Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome theory, which they unpacked in Mille Plateux. One possible precursor of the theory of web structures is certainly the labyrinths of Robbe-Grillet.

The hotel's endless corridors, lavish salons and geometric gardens are pristine but sterile, grand but suffocating, creating an eerie environment where the passage of time becomes uncertain and events seem to loop or repeat endlessly. The film's use of repetition reinforces this sense of eternal recurrence, trapping its protagonists in a purgatorial state of suspended animation.

The film draws heavily on the cinematic traditions of the uncanny hotel room and haunted castle motif, creating a space that is both psychologically oppressive and metaphysically ambiguous. While the exact first instance of an uncanny hotel room may vary depending on interpretation, films such as ’Nosferatu’ and ’The Phantom of the Opera’, and later ’Psycho’, suggest the potential for such spaces to be uncanny. The ’Shining’ cemented its place in horror cinema as a setting ripe for psychological and supernatural terror, but as the purest place of transition, always a locus/topoi outside of space and time and thus functioning more as a rhetorical figure, a trope, it has inspired masterpieces such as Chantal Akerman's ’Hotel Monterey, David Lynch's 'Hotel Room' or Coen's ’Barton Fink’. Going back to earlier cinematic history, a good example is Jean Cocteau's ’The Blood of a Poet’, in which dreamlike, surreal sequences take place in various rooms that feel ephemeral and unsettling.

At the same time, the chateau evokes the tradition of the haunted castle, a Gothic trope deeply rooted in cinema and literature. The first film to feature a haunted house or castle is Georges Méliès's ’The Haunted Castle’ (1896), which, despite its brevity and comedic tone, is recognised as the pioneer of haunted spaces in cinema. Subsequent films such as ’The Haunted House’, ’The Cat and the Canary’ and ’The Old Dark House’ (1932) developed the theme. Like the haunted rooms in ’Nosferatu’ or ’The Phantom of the Opera’, the castle in Marienbad seems to exist outside of time, filled with echoes of the past that haunt the present. The characters, especially X., are trapped within the castle's walls, unable to escape its lingering memories --- memories that may or may not be real.

LYM shares a striking thematic and atmospheric affinity with Mario Bava's ’Lisa and the Devil’, another film that uses a decaying castle as a space of metaphysical horror and dislocation. In Bava's film, Lisa, a tourist, is trapped in a surreal, ghostly mansion where time seems to be distorted and the past seems to invade the present. As in Marienbad, the castle in Lisa and the Devil is a haunted space populated by strange, possibly undead figures and their effigies, kinda puppets who seem stuck in eternal roles, re-enacting moments from their past.

Both films play with the motif of memory and the dissolution of identity, using the grand, decaying mansion or hotel as a symbol of the fragility of the Ego, of the self. In ’Lisa and the Devil’, the titular Lisa becomes increasingly disoriented, unsure whether she is herself or the reincarnation of someone from the past. This echoes A.'s uncertainty in Marienbad, where she either cannot or will not remember the events described by X. The disintegration of identity in both films is linked to the uncanny spaces they inhabit, in Marienbad, the hotel exists as a dreamlike space where time is suspended and the characters are trapped in an endless loop of repeated dialogue and action. Similarly, in Bava's film, Lisa becomes entangled in a house that defies time, populated by characters who are neither fully alive nor dead, trapped in an eternal cycle of their own making.

I was delighted to discover that Chantal Akerman and Mario Bava had made their film in the same year, 1973, about life as a strange, uncanny place, a temporary home, a kind of purgatory. Two wonderful endpoints on a cultural scale, and I am delighted to imagine the young Akerman, like a kind of Penelope, deconstructing Bava's visually and culturally rich fabric at night, without even knowing it, back to the elementary concept, the core, which then returns half a century later with almost imperceptible modulations in the art of Benning or Geyrhalter, while the uncanny hotel of Marienbad is an invisible link between them.

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Following my review, Adam T has compiled a list of Uncanny Hotels: letterboxd.com/acol_vida/list/hotels-as-liminal-spaces/
See this review too: letterboxd.com/przewalskihorse/film/last-year-at-marienbad/ Homework done!