Last Year at Marienbad

In a large hotel a man tells a woman they met last year and that she promised to leave with him. She does not remember, and perhaps it never happened. The film does not resolve the question and does not intend to. The narrative repeats the same scenes in different clothes, different rooms and different endings; which is memory and which is desire stays unsettled. The famous shot in which the people in the garden cast no shadow sums it up. Alain Resnais directed from a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the two disagreed publicly about what the film was about. It won the Golden Lion in Venice. A real warning: this film does not tell a story, and trying to work it out is exhausting. It is valuable if you want to see what cinema can do without narrative; do not come with any other expectation.