Last Year at Marienbad

UPC: 715515046312

Studio: Criterion

MPAA Rating: NR   Contains:[Adult Situations]

Summary: A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the movie is a riddle of seduction, a mercurial enigma darting between a present and past which may not even exist, let alone converge. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as an unnamed sophisticate attempting to convince a similarly nameless woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met and were romantically involved a year ago in the same enormous, baroque European hotel. In the end, it hardly matters -- they're not characters so much as pawns anyway. Hypnotically dreamlike, Last Year at Marienbad is a surrealist parody of Hollywood melodrama, a high-fashion romance with a dark, alien underbelly. According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence -- the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

Category: Avant-garde / Exp

Awards: Best Film - Any Source – British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Original Screenplay – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Golden Lion – Venice International Film Festival

Features: Audio interview with Resnais
Documentary on the making of DLast Year at Marienbad, featuring interviews with many of Resnais' collaborators
Video interview with film scholar Ginette Vincendeau on the history of the film and its many mysteries
Two short documentaries by Resnais: Toute la m?moire du monde (1956) and Le chant du styr?ne (1958)
Original theatrical trailer and Rialto's rerelease trailer

Last Year at Marienbad

Format: Blu-ray

Release Date: 06/23/2009

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Cinemascope

Runtime: 94 Minutes

Sides: 1

Number of Discs: 1

Language(s) French

Subtitles: English

Region: Blu-ray region A (North America, Central America, South America, Japan, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia)

Leo Charney

One of the most enigmatic and distinctive movies ever made, this collaboration of director Alain Resnais with leading French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet has confounded and intrigued audiences since it first led the wave of European art movies in the early 1960s. Wandering through and around the story of a mysterious love triangle as it wanders through and around its hotel setting, the film can be interpreted, among other possibilities, as a parody of Hollywood romantic melodramas; as an effort to find a new way to tell a romantic melodrama, free of the clich?s imposed by Hollywood; as a mystery, whose answer is finally unresolved and perhaps unresolvable; as, therefore, a Rashomon-like examination of the uncertainty of truth; as a philosophical inquiry into truth, time, memory, and personal identity; as a purely sensual melange of shapes and sounds -- grand architecture, striking compositions, and strange soundtrack elements; as a self-reflexive examination of cinema itself; or as a game, like the logarithm game at the center of the story, played by the filmmakers with the audience. Whatever interpretation(s) one favors, this is, for better or for worse, an unforgettable and unique movie, a high-water mark of postwar European art cinema. ~ Leo Charney, Rovi

Cast and Crew: Françoise Bertin  Actor 
Gerard Lorin  Actor 
Helena Kornel  Actor 
Luce Garcia-Ville  Actor 
Jean Lanier  Actor 
Gilles Queant  Actor 
Pierre Barbaud  Actor 
Wilhelm von Deek  Actor 
Alain Resnais  Director 
Alain Robbe-Grillet  Screenwriter 
Raymond Froment  Producer 
Francis Seyrig  Composer (Music Score) 
Pierre Courau  Producer 
Delphine Seyrig  Actor 
Giorgio Albertazzi  Actor 
Sacha Pitoeff  Actor 
Francoise Spira  Actor 

Country: France,Italy