James Bond's Worst Nightmare (In French)

The Last Year at Marienbad is extremely hard to get through on your first viewing if:
a. You do not know anything about French New Wave
b. You are already sleepy.

This being my first viewing of the a fore mentioned movie I had some problems. The cyclical filming and dialogue caused my eyes to close two or three times. The French voice mixed with the repeating dialogue will lull you into a coma. The beginning of the movie is a series of shots looking up at chandeliers at other things you would see on the ceiling of a castle or mansion. It is overlapped with a poem that is repeated and it is almost calling you to go to sleep, to begin dreaming yourself.

Also, the narrative in the story is f*****. I got a better hold on the story when talking about it in class. Watching it in class made my brain hurt trying to follow it. Professor McRae told us not to pay attention to the story and just pay attention to the camera tricks and the techniques used by the film makers. I couldn't do it. While the cinematic style pulls you into a almost dreamlike state, the story doesn't let you go either. A love triangle between the characters the script calls X, the narrator, A the woman and subject of men's desires, and M, possibly A's husband, is gone over and shown through various situations throughout the film.

The movie revolves around X's attempt to pick up A. X being the creepy guy in the image to the right, and A being the woman in the man's crosshairs. The way I interpret the narrative in the film is by trying to establish a linear series of events. The movie takes place at a mansion and the events X is talking about happened one year before that day. The one scene that does not change is the scene where X and A are out in the courtyard against the base of a statue. X is feelin' all up on A and while she seems into it for like three seconds, she tells him to leave her alone. After this, all events are subject to change and we get multiple versions of the same events.

Much like the odd shots of peoples images reflecting off of mirrors and shiny objects, we get an obscure view of everything that happens after the event at the statue. What makes logical sense to me in this movie is that X is traumatized by being shot down by A and after wards cannot escape a series of what if situations in his dreams. He keeps creating and recreating events in his dream so that he gets the girl. He is stuck in the mansion, which we get a feeling of through the repetitive dialogue, and can only escape his nightmare with the woman that he is seeking. Because this is a dream A also becomes subject to X's will and ends up leaving with him.

This feels like James Bond's worst nightmare to me because;
1. He is British and therefore hates French.
2. Is stuck in a French Mansion.
3. Does not get the girl.
Everyone in the film is really well dressed and look like they were pulled straight from a Bond film. We also get a feel for this series of what if situations that the bond character creates because he is shot down by the girl is the formality of their speech. In class we talked about listening to the French dialogue and how they always talk to each other in an extremely formal fashion which could hint to their never getting past the initial hook up phase.

The article on how this movie relates to Descartes was really an interesting read. The courtyard above is apparently a product of Cartesian thought. The symmetry and angular shapes go to the thought that the mind, being a non-physical entity, sees nature as raw material for people to superimpose their ideas on nature. The gardens would be construct into angular shapes that are anything but what would appear in nature. Which is also interesting considering how often this picture shows up in the film. It is almost as if the director is trying to tell the viewer that everything there in the film is subject to X's mind, and is not what actually happened.