At a social gathering at a château or baroque hotel, a man insists to a woman that they have met before. But it seems she hardly remembers the affair they may have had (or not?) last year at Marienbad.
Profoundly mysterious and disturbing, a para-surrealist masterpiece whose nightmarish scenario appears to have been absorbed from Buñuel and Antonioni and transmitted onward to Greenaway.
[VIDEO ESSAY] Alain Resnais's transcendent filmic parlor game remains an innovative and exquisitely executed example of minimalist filmmaking, used to evoke mystery, romance, and a sprinkle social invective.
The movie is what it is -- a sustained mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment outside of time, and a shocking intimation of perfection.
Chicago Reader
January 15, 2008
The film's dreamlike cadences, frozen tableaux, and distilled surrealist poetry are too eerie, too terrifying even, to be shaken off as camp. For all its notoriety, this masterpiece among masterpieces has never really received its due.
an enigmatic mind-melt that sends characters and viewers alike on a chronology-confounding loop down labyrinthine corridors and up garden paths in pursuit of a (re)solution that, even after it has been found, remains elusive and ambiguous.
Slant Magazine
December 21, 2011
The poster child of cinematic modernism, one of those early-'60s event films that seemed to break every rule classical Hollywood ever codified.
To even talk of a story is nonsensical, since a central aesthetic of the film involves the effects of fantasy, time and subjective memory on human consciousness. Marienbad takes place in a heightened, sci-fi nightmare world where knowing, believing
