Can a film exist as a piece of literature while challenging the nature of reality?

Entertainment · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Alain Resnais’s 1961 masterpiece, Last Year at Marienbad, defies traditional storytelling by treating its screenplay as a literary work. This French New Wave enigma blurs the lines between memory and imagination, leaving viewers to navigate a shifting, dreamlike landscape where the reliability of human perception is constantly called into question.

The film emerged from a unique partnership between director Alain Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet. Rather than following a standard cinematic structure, the project was conceived as a 'ciné-novel,' a literary script that prioritized the mechanics of thought and memory over linear progression. This collaboration aimed to explore the ambiguous boundary between objective reality and subjective experience, a central preoccupation in the director’s body of work.

Set within a grand, baroque hotel, the narrative centers on three unnamed figures: a man who insists he and a woman shared an affair the previous year, the woman who denies ever meeting him, and a second man who may be her husband. The film frequently employs disorienting shifts in time and location, using repetitive tracking shots and voice-overs to create a sense of unease. The characters themselves often appear in artificial, static poses, echoing the aesthetic of silent cinema rather than naturalistic drama.

The production process was as unconventional as the final result. Although the creators claimed to share a unified vision, they worked largely in isolation, with the director translating the writer’s detailed instructions into visual form. Over time, the authors offered conflicting accounts of their collaboration, with the writer occasionally describing the film as a betrayal of his original text despite his admiration for its beauty. Ultimately, the work offers no definitive resolution, inviting the audience to decide what is real and what is merely a product of the characters' fractured consciousness.

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