best film ever made, absolute symmetry, time wise and space wiseIt is like an artistic interpretation of quantum physics.A love is going on in a mysterious hotel where the events repeat themselves, each time a different way...best film ever made, absolute symmetry, timewise and spacewise. Just watch it. If you are patient you will get it..This film is only appropriate for mathematicians or architects, or both and whoever has the gift to watch it and appreciate it.I have to submit 10 lines but I have no further comments, that is it. Enjoy it Watch it Recollect.

I saw this when I was a teenager and didn't know what the fuss was about and had a feeling it was pandering to people who like to think they are clever ... I watched it again last night, 40 years later as I thought maybe I was too young and had missed something ... I hadn't Good Points ... Its quite nicely filmed, but how could you go wrong in such sumptuous surroundings ... Delphine Seyrig was an amazingly interesting and beautiful woman, although she hasn't reached her peak in this ... There are no more good points The writing and direction are both stilted and heavy handed in their determination to be obtuse ... Their arrogance and self importance literally drips off the screen ... Compare this to the films of Cocteau who was a true talent ... Unfortunately some films have always been bolstered by the faux intellectual bourgeoisie and this is one of the major players in that category ... It is of course complete and utter nonsense

I last watched this forty years ago, so I thought I would have a go at it. I was a grad student at the time, probably at the most pretentious time in my life. People left the film, shown at a college theater, remarking on its various esoteric qualities (many of them were trying to impress their dates with their cinematic acumen). I didn't get it, yet I got it. The visual nature of this film and its "unstuck in time (apologies to Kurt Vonnegut)" framework ha stayed with me this whole time. Renting it and watching it again, I was struck with the eerie give and take of its characters, the amazing shots of that building, the rooms that become so central to everything captivated me again. I don't know why exactly, but like "2001: A Space Odyssey," I couldn't take my eyes off it. I really believe that Resnais blended the ideas of Heisenberg with contemporary representational art. Like so much of life, our day to day existences are really repetitive and circuitous (should I say, boring) and so an encounter becomes so significant to one entity while not so significant to another. If, indeed, the encounter ever really happened. It was nice to return to this film with the kind of innocence I felt leaving the university theater those many years ago.

There have been many, many discussions about the meaning that Resnais wanted to convey with Last Year in Marienbad. Having just listened to the interview that Resnais gives (in French) about the movie (and which is available on the Criterion edition), and having the additional luck to speak French as my first language, I can confidently say that Resnais seemed extremely ambiguous about any meaning that the film might or might not have. By meaning, I am referring to any single interpretation or rational explanation of the movie. The author of an artistic piece, whether it is painting, music, sculpture or any medium of expression, does not have any obligation to provide a formal explanation of his/her work.Very simply said, I believe that Resnais, here, managed to make a film in the same way as any other artist using any other form of artistic expression. And he succeeded beautifully. We are hypnotized by the sheer, amazing beauty of the images and the actors, the pathos-inducing organ playing and the playful tricks that Resnais spread throughout the dialogues/monologues, the sets, the reflections in the mirrors, and the whole bagful of cinematographic visual gimmicks, charades and deceptions and then some more. This alone exerts a fascination on the viewer, and simply by shutting down the analytical part of one's brain - something akin to the full sensory availability or receptiveness one can achieve practising yoga or TM -, one finds out that a LOT is happening in Last Year in Marienbad.When watching the film in such a state of receptiveness, the artistic value of Last Year in Marienbad begins to take over, and the urge to find a single logical thread, or any thread at all, tends to dwindle and allow one to really enjoy the pure experience of watching that movie. LYAM is not a popcorn/Tweeting-while-watching kind of film, by far and large: one must be entirely available, both mentally and physically to appreciate it totally. Difficult movie? Sure. Aggravating? Yes. It's not a flawless masterpiece. Like the jury at the 1961 Cannes Festival, I find Giorgio Albertazzi's (X) accent absolutely grating on my nerves, and the artistic choice of using the combination of a refrigerating, detached acting style with an artificial, pretentious-sounding, emotionless and mechanical tone of speaking (verging on the ridiculous), a resounding mistake. Despite these flaws, and choosing to accept them nonetheless, LYAM remains in its form an exquisitely beautiful movie and a pure ravishment for the senses. It is also probably the purest form of expression the seventh art ever reached. It's likely the closest a film has ever been from expressing the feeling of abstraction that lies at the blurred frontier between wakefulness and sleep. An oneiric film that compares with all other abstract forms of art.I listened very closely to Resnais in the interview I was mentioning at the beginning. I really don't think he had a clean-cut, first-degree story to tell with this movie. He clearly leaves you the impression that he was first and foremost seduced by the aesthetic values of the script Robbe-Grillet had sent him. That was his leitmotiv and that was the leitmotiv he also tried to convey with the movie.I was intrigued by the suggestion made not only by Ginette Vincendeau, the cinema scholar who is interviewed on the Criterion Supplement DVD, but also by Resnais himself in an interview apparently made around the time that LYAM was released (according to Mrs. Vincendeau's recollection - I didn't look for that interview yet), that the movie's actual subject is rape. Of course, rape is one among the few first-degree meanings that anyone with a brain can deduce easily in several scenes of the movie. Until I learned about this, I could not really decide that the idea of a rape was formally presented in LYAM. As for all concrete suggestions that come to mind when absorbing the film, there always remains a feeling of ambiguity that prevents the idea that this deals with rape from gelling. But if it is true that LYAM actually deals with rape in a topical manner, I will soon revisit the movie keeping this in mind. As a note of caution, however: in Resnais' interview on the Criterion DVD, Resnais later seemed to deny that we should view the culprit scenes as depicting a rape.Decidedly, LYAM is the cinematographic representation of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. That is, when you see something in the movie, you automatically end up missing something else that then escapes your detection, with the result that you can never obtain a full knowledge of the movie's content. Or, let's say that the film's beauty is as evanescent as the most delicate and colourful jellyfish's: you can only contemplate it from behind a glass panel in an aquarium. As soon as you remove it from its element to better watch it, it then becomes a lump of amorphous jelly that evokes disgust instead of the exhilaration felt when a barrier existed between the animal and you.