subscribeRape and Murder
by Nancy Cantwell
Last Year at Marienbad is first and foremost about persuasion. Can X (Giorgio Albertazzi) convince A (Delphine Seyrig) that indeed they had an affair last year, persuade her to abandon her husband and depart, forever his? Does he make his argument by supplanting her memory or by coercion? Is this love or conquest? The audience must decide if the premise of a brief encounter followed by a promise to return is real or imagined. The characters have no inner voice, no motivation and no history beyond the walls of the decadent facades of the hotel or the confines of the all too formal gardens upon which to base conclusions. Screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet states, “…it deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision his own words. And if his persistence, his secret conviction, finally prevail, they do so among a perfect labyrinth of false trains, variants, failures and repetitions!”
Dark forces are at work and because of the deliberate non-linear dramatic structure one is drawn to make conclusions about the sub or unconscious at play. In Marienbad, false and true, past and present all conspire to conceal the present tense from X, A and M (Sasha Pitöeff). Where there are gaps, obscured regions of memory, does the mind fill in the void with fodder of its own, does the seducer implant a convenient past or as Robbe-Grillet suggests, “They are imaginings: an imagining, if it is vivid enough, is always in the present.”?
Imaginings of rape and murder drive Marienbad to its crescendo. Chanel dresses Delphine Seyrig, in a most spectacular feathered robe, for both ill fated scenarios. It is here that X is at the height of his construct. Murdered first, shot by her husband, A lies in a variety of melodramatic repose. Then, in an abrupt reversal of theory she is resurrected. X: “…No, this isn’t the right ending…I must have you alive…”. The motif of violation persists and next turns to ravishment. In the original script Robbe-Grillet calls for a “Rather swift and brutal rape scene.”, but Resnais was more inclined to shoot an implied altercation. A simply recoils in horror at the encroaching X, and, as imaginings are wont to do, our protagonist again retracts his savage conjecture . X: “No, no, no! (violently:) That’s wrong… (calmer:) It wasn’t by force…Remember…”.
Because the characters have no internal psychology there is a frustration as the viewer tries to determine whether the violence is a repressed memory or delusion. And our customary desire to cast moral judgment upon rape and murder is stunted by a constant shift in frame of reference. We are destabilized in the normal perception of violence, left with mere possibilities to comprehend. Neutralized, murder and rape become devices that reflect more upon themselves than act as offerings to help us decipher character motivation or plot outcome.
So intended Robbe-Grillet. His vision was based on the ability of a cinematic media whose “essential characteristic of the image is its present-ness.” Mareinbad gives us an opportunity to experience a cinema that “by its very nature, what we see on the screen is in the act of happening, we are given the gesture itself, not the account of it.” Our instinctual efforts to “try to reconstitute some Cartesian scheme” run into roadblocks and prevent us from coming to terms with a cinema of pure subjectivities. For Robbe-Grillet, ready made psychologies made for clumsy systems of interpretation which “machine made fiction or films grind out ad nauseam, and are the worst kind of abstractions.”
