The eternal return: Last Year at Marienbad

For all its ostensible chilly formalism, for all its legendary difficulty, in the slowly shifting dynamic of suggestion, resistance and surrender that underlies every moment of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) there are things that, to my mind, can’t help but worm their way into the most tenebrous corners of the psyche. Memory, to paraphrase a character in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, is a language we all (mistakenly) believe we speak. But its malleability, its essential formlessness holds the key to our deepest fears and desires. The seduction at the heart of Marienbad is that of having someone recount to you all that you can’t recall about some moment that’s either dissolved into the fog of your past or, your strongly suspect, never happened. The seducer wants you to believe in that romance you never had, telling it to you over and over until this miracle happens and you begin to complete the memory yourself. And if you can be persuaded of the verity of this memory—of not only the romance but also the possibility of its revival—you may still have the chance at freedom you thought lost.

The promise of Marienbad is right there in a narrative as utterly simple as its realization is labyrinthine, a variation on a thousand other movies—in short, a love triangle. At a vast luxury country resort populated by well-heeled guests, X (Italian heartthrob Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince A (Delphine Seyrig, virtually unknown at the time) that they met in this same place the year previous, fell in love, and planned to run away together. Away from prying eyes and oppressive décor; from M (Sacha Pitoëff), A’s pale, vaguely vampiric husband, who always wins at the impenetrable table games he plays with the other guests; from “this edifice of a bygone era, this sprawling, sumptuous, baroque, gloomy hotel where one endless corridor follows another,” a place where people seem to always be returning out of sheer habit, where statues seem to move when no one looks, and people often resemble statues, a place where even shadows reveal discrepancies and whose boundaries are never breached at any point in the movie. As the camera continually surveys the place, adrift like a listless ghost, you start to wonder if the only “true” memories are to be found within its moldings, chandeliers and sculpted doorways.

Director Alain Resnais and novelist-turned-screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet never let on. Robe-Grillet was inspired by Adolfo Bioy Casares’ fantastical masterwork The Invention of Morel, and his script shares the late Argentine author’s design of a narrative logic that remains partially hidden from the audience while providing a solid foundation for all that transpires. Sacha Vierny’s weightless camerawork and Jacques Saulnier’s production design—the hotel’s interiors were all constructed—convey an absolute elegance that would imbue countless perfume adverts and inspire Stanley Kubrick’s wandering through the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (80). In the flamboyantly elliptical editing patterns of Resnais and editors Henri Colpi and Jasmine Chasney, the film’s baffling yet most explicit expression of its interplay of memory and fantasy, we find the blueprint for the most mesmerizing sequences in Wong Kar-Wai. In Seyrig’s marvelous performance, aided by a dizzying array of costume changes furnished by Coco Chanel, bewitching make-up and sweep of bangs that seem to invite her being swept off her feet, we’re given a beguiling balance of cool opacity and near-palpable anxiety. She’s in danger. She proves just how many expressions one face can give to uncertainty and unease, while still every bit the embodiment of useless glamour and the elusive promise of sex. She’d soon play the central role in Resnais’ still more intricate investigation into the same core themes—plus a bracing political subtext—in Muriel (63), and moodily inhabit another similarly memory-haunted house in Marguerite Duras’ India Song (75).

Watching Criterion’s well-endowed and gorgeous new director-approved DVD edition—also available in Blu-ray—I fell under the spell of Marienbad all over again. Which is to say I got totally lost in the thing, its details, repetitions, infinite mirrors and strange echoes, the shattered glass and collapsing marble rail, the sexual assault that reads as clown show. And even after having just seen it again I question my memory of it, small moments that may have happened, or maybe just alluded to, maybe only suggested in some subtle way. Maybe I just invented them, as we sometimes do with movies that consume us. I’ll happily re-watch it and try to confirm whether this or that memory is true, though I suspect I’ll just get lost all over again. Either way, these memories are worth holding onto, even if they lead me astray.

Just because you're paranoid: revisiting three terrorific tales by Guy de Maupassant

I’d happened upon a dog-eared copy of his collected stories while staying alone for a few days in this sort of cottage belonging to the father of a friend, a little place in the Rockies. This was years ago and I recall knowing next to nothing about Guy de Maupassant, really, though some sliver of a memory told me ‘Le Horla’ was supposed to be something special. I cooked up some coffee, rubbed my knees to get warm, nestled by a foggy widow in the kitchen, figuring I’d kill a little time with some light reading. I didn’t figure on being unshakably creeped out. Or on the story being so deliciously wrought.

It seems Maupassant’s not read so much these days, at least in English. I don’t know his novels, but his stories are marvelous. I’ve been reacquainting myself with several of them, partially because I've been realizing just how many great filmmakers have adapted Maupassant—Buñuel, Ophüls, Godard—but mostly because autumn is the time of year I habitually set aside for reading anything that might raise the little back-of-the-neck hairs, which often winds up being something from the 1900s, that century haunted by the clash of scientific discovery and persistent folklore, by anxieties drawn from exploration, colonialism and industrialization. Several of Maupassant’s best stories are sly examinations of class insecurity, some, like the marvelous ‘Tellier House’ or ‘Mademoiselle Fifi,’ focus specifically on the fortunes of wily prostitutes. Relatively few could be considered horror in the strictest sense, and those that come closest are relentlessly ambiguous with regards to the supernatural—yet the very particular breed of unease in which they trade functions as a sort of bridge between Poe and Paul Bowles, while exhibiting a flair for economy that looks forward to Hemingway.

‘The Hand’ is a terrific example of Maupassant’s deft managing of the short, sharp macabre, one of those tales relayed by a party with only limited knowledge of what truly passed. A magistrate promises a small audience of women—it seems always the women who are openly curious about all things ghastly or inexplicable in these stories—his memory of “a case that truly seemed to verge on fantasy,” involving an Englishman residing in a Corsican town, a place teeming with legends of violent vendettas. The Englishman possesses an impressive collection of trophies from his travels to exotic lands, among them a human hand, shackled at the wrist, which belonged to an American, the Englishman’s “worst enemy.” Things get especially interesting when the Englishman is mysteriously murdered, and I love the way Maupassant has his otherwise very orderly narrator stop in the midst of describing a crime scene to conspicuously note that the culprit was never found. A finger, however, eventually is. I won’t tell you where.

‘The Inn’ was supposedly a big influence on Stephen King’s The Shinning, though its narrative simplicity and formal elegance could have just as easily informed countless subsequent stories of cabin fever. It concerns a pair of guides looking after an inn nestled in “those bare and rocky gorges that cut through white mountain peaks,” a place that serves as refuge for travelers going through the Gemini Pass. As the story begins the guides are escorting their summer guests down the mountain on the eve of winter, when the inn becomes a “snowy prison” and the area impassable. Ulrich, the younger of the guides, is heartsick for one of the daughters of the departing family, and Maupassant, in spare language, vividly evokes the ache felt as the desired girl carries on past the point where the guides must turn back, disappearing into the distant valley that will soon be erased under a blanket of white.

But the pain of the girl’s absence felt by Ulrich will eventually be replaced by his panic over the absence of Gaspard, his elder co-worker and sole companion for the six-month long off-season, aside from their dog. With Gaspard’s disappearance, paranoia replaces longing, rising like a presence within the “death-like hush of the sleeping mountains.” Maupassant traces Ulrich’s growing worries in prose that keeps within the constraints of reportage, always cool and detached, the antithesis of the histrionics that can makes the work of H.P. Lovecraft, for one, hard to take at times.

Oddly enough, Lovecraft cited ‘Le Horla’ as a source of inspiration for his own ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ though whatever tonal resemblance they share might be explained by the fact that ‘Horla’ is written in the first-person as a journal, allowing Maupassant to indulge in flights of subjective inner turmoil on behalf of his lonesome, deeply troubled protagonist, who, regardless of how we interpret his claims of being pursued by some invisible entity, is clearly losing his marbles. Maupassant’s prose is by nature not overtly poetic, yet there’s much poetry in his looping of images which shift in meaning upon return, as is the case with the ship from Brazil sailing down the Seine. When first it appears our protagonist is so inexplicably moved by its grace that he salutes it. By the time it returns, this ship will become a harbinger of catastrophic malaise.

The journal keeper is tormented by a heightened awareness of the invisible influences at work in the world, phenomena that seems to him sufficiently grounded in both science and common sense. His sleep is gradually invaded by the sensation of some succubus-like presence, what would today be likely diagnosed as the effects of parasomnia. He sees containers of water and milk mysteriously drained every night. At one point he witnesses the power of hypnosis on a relative and is overcome with terror of the psyche’s frailty, all the more reason to feel susceptible to the elusive force he characterizes as spying, watching, penetrating and dominating. He’s spiraling into some sort of psychologically induced abyss, clearly, yet this doesn’t mean that the entity won’t succeed in corrupting and finally ruining him.

“Solitude is certainly dangerous for active intellects,” the protagonist of ‘Le Horla’ tells us, which may remind us of the inherent solitude of the writer. At one point the protagonist complains about having never read anything that might describe his condition—but how did Maupassant feel toward the end of his life, shortened by syphilis and its accompanying madness, knowing that not only had he read about such conditions but actually wrote about them? Some say he was already going mad when he wrote ‘Le Horla.’ He died, a year after attempting suicide, on June 6, 1893. He was 42.