Last Year at Marienbad

First off, from a story standpoint, I got nothing out of this movie. It was too back and forth with what was real and what was fantasy that I couldn't get a solid concept. However, I think that let me focus more on a visual standpoint rather than try to pay attention to the events.

I felt like right off the bat, the movie made it seem like you weren't supposed to see everything. It's like you're trying to take a tour but it keeps abrubtly jumping forward so you aren't getting a definite picture. We want to smoothly go through so we can look at what we want to and draw upon that but it jumps ahead regardless forcing you to look at something new before we can take in what we were looking at before. This trend continued when people are shown in the film. For short gaps, people just stop moving and we move by with no interactions or change. To me, this seemed like the jumps from before are still going on, we just see what was in the gap. Visually, we are getting to see what was in that gap, but it makes it so that even though we now get to see it, we still learn nothing from it.

Similar jumps take place while X is telling his stories of last year to A. We move around between past, present, and fantasy to the point that we aren't sure which is which. It distances us from reality to where we are trying to find our way back to what is real while it constantly pushes us farther from it. At one scene, the film tries to flip from night where everyone is wearing dark outfits to a completely white room with A in a white dress. The scene then flips back to dark and begins to flash between the two. It's almost as if the change is such a drastic contrast that it splits the scene into both reality and fantasy at the same time and it can't handle the change. It's one of the few times it forcefully pulls us back into view of which part is the present (at least what we think of as the present, to be honest, who the hell knows what's real or not).

One particular thing that I took note of was the game that M played throughout the movie. Every time the game is played, it's with different objects and though how things are taken out of the rows, M always ends up winning. I saw it as a symbolic representation of X's telling of the story. Though the time and place of the film is constantly switching, the story remains the same. Even when A asks questions like who and where, X just remarks it doesn't matter. Similar to how the details of the game don't matter, the outcome of both stays the same regardless of the variations.

Overall, it was complicated but it was entertaining in it's own way. It twists and turns making what might be a simple telling of a story into a complex "faux reality". As in the reading, the film gives X, or maybe A depending on how you view it, a very solipsistic view. We aren't sure what is real except for the single character themself. For all we know, nothing but that character is real and everything else is just a fantasy of the character. I'm sure everyone gets something different from this film depending on how they think of everything. For me, though I did enjoy it for the most part, was just a gigantic "What?"