Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

...is the source of its special beauty. like a fog. like a flavour. because it i the result of a special meet between Robbe - Grillet and Alain Resnais. nothing surprising for the readers of New Novel books and for the familiar public of Resnais. except, maybe, a sort of revelation. subtle, tender, fragile, like a mirror gallery. short, a legendary film. and a sort of Sphinx question.

Art reaches its peak when it becomes self-conscious. Movie-wise, the best example is perhaps Fellini's "8 1/2". In this strict sense, "Marienbad" might be Resnais' "8 1/2". A character becomes self-conscious about his own character-nature and tries to drag another character out of the château (out of the movie itself) where they've been trapped for more than a year (two years? a decade? since 1961?).Every time one watches "Marienbad", those same characters meet again, and one of them is already sick of the same rooms and the same greyness. They're like statues, frozen in time. Time, indeed, doesn't matter, as the narrator puts it. The woman's dress is "dark, perhaps black" because how can he tell, if he's stuck in a 2D black & white, endless, repetitive avant-garde flick? The "husband" always wins the game - he warns people about it, he knows he's been winning all this time and will continue to win, as long as people keep watching. Each time you hit the play button, that guy adds more wins to his resume, and another photograph is added to the collection inside the lady's drawer.Surely this is only one among countless other possible interpretations. The plot may be also/mostly a contemplation on memory or cheating partners. But "Marienbad" contains, still, this layer of self-awareness, like the characters could almost sense there's a camera and a viewer somewhere: ghosts watching their eternal existence, they themselves fearful of being no more than ghosts, trying to escape the inevitable, and perversely making us see/remember that our existence is not really that different from theirs.

Although he'd been active in French cinema since 1947 Alain Resnais had the misfortune to make two landmark films during the short-lived so called New Wave hiccup which lasted something like four years from the late 1950s to the early 1960s but like Louis Malle, who began his own career at roughly the same time, and was tarred erroneously with the same brush, Resnais went on to become a highly distinguished mainstream filmmaker. One doesn't have to look far to see that Marienbad has little or no relationship to the dross being turned out by Godard and Truffaut; for one thing the genuine new waveleteers took misplaced pride in shooting on the street and making a movie for a stick of gum with friends and acquaintances handling most of the technical jobs, while from the very first frame it is evident that Marienbad employed top technicians to create and shoot the stunning effects, as well as spending lavishly on costume - every single person on screen, without exception, is in formal attire, tuxedos for the men, evening dress for the women, and groomed within an inch of their lives. This leaves us with the problematical screenplay by Alain Robbe Grillet but since I have no more idea than the regular film buff of what 1) it is about or 2) what it means I'm quite happy to let the Academic-Pseud axis compare orgasms, say that it's stunning to look at and leave it at that.

This French language film was one featured in the book of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, from director Alain Resnais (Night and Fog), but like most of the other titles I had no clue about what it would entail, so I was hoping at five stars out of five it would be worthy of the honour. Basically at a château or baroque hotel a social gathering is taking place, a man, referred to as 'X' (Giorgio Albertazzi) approaches a woman, referred to as 'A' (Delphine Seyrig). He claims that had met before previously a year ago at Marienbad, he is also convinced that she has come to the event intentionally as she was waiting for him, but she says that have never met before. Her husband, referred to as 'M' (Sacha Pitoëff), tries to stop the man from bothering his wife, and challenges him in a mathematical game and beats him several times, but he seems to be correct as the film delves into flashback sequences as he describes past meetings. That is all I can say really, I think maybe because the characters had no names, and the story going backwards and forwards in time it was perhaps a little confusing. But the camera winding through various corridors, the use of voice overs and the scenes between the two lead characters are interesting enough, from what I can remember it was a watchable drama. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen, and it was nominated the BAFTA for Best Film from any Source. Good!