The Top Drop

The cold halls of a German castle, now a resort. Idlers. Fragments of meaningless dialogue. A stranger finds the eyes of a young woman and tells her that one year ago he met her here in this same place. Her husband was off in the casino, as he is now, gambling, paying no attention to her. She agreed, the stranger tells her, to meet him again in a year's time, and to go away with him. She does not remember if she was there last year or not. But she goes with the stranger, and her husband does nothing to stop her. Perhaps he is not her husband.

So begins a motion picture called Last Year in Marienbad, easy to smile at, difficult to understand, the work of one of the most acclaimed directors in modern cinema, the New Wave's Alain Resnais. Like his masterpiece, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the new film compresses and realigns conventional treatment of time, making a looping bow of past and future and knotting it down on the present. Leaving relationships vague, carefully avoiding the usual structure of cause and effect, it tries to force audiences to interpret the story for themselves. Last week Marienbad was named winner of the 1961 Venice Film Festival.

Sidewalk Spieler. In the main, the choice received respectful if somewhat bewildered applause. But Resnais and Novelist Robbe-Grillet, who wrote Marienbad's scenario, created more confusion than they had on the screen by arguing before the press about the meaning of their film. "This movie," said Robbe-Grillet, "is no more than the story of a persuasion, and one must remember that the man is not telling the truth. The couple did not meet the year before." Not so, said Resnais. "I could never have shot this film if I had not been convinced that their meeting had actually taken place."

The final question--whether the movie is art or arty--is probably answered by the character and background of Alain Resnais himself. He sometimes talks like an undergraduate who has got drunk on The Alexandria Quartet: "The film is about the reality which is made up of the appearances of reality," he has said. "You don't know if it is present, past, or even future." But he is much more than a sidewalk spieler. He is a grounded artist, seeking new ways to find what he has called "the mass audience which is weary of explanatory scenes, dialogue whose sole purpose is 'to keep the action going,' and the all too obvious sequence of shots 'logically' strung together."

Hypnotic Gas. A quiet, secretive, self-educated, 39-year-old intellectual who is calm and courteous on the set and an utter mystery to his friends, Resnais was born in Vannes, the son of a Breton pharmacist. He made his first motion picture, called Adventures of Fantomas, when he was 13, using 8-mm. film and proceeding on the lovely green theory that if he concentrated on closeups his child actors would look adult.

Moving to Paris at 14, he learned the film cutter's craft, later worked as an assistant director, and soon after World War II began a series of documentaries that won him a sound reputation in the field, and got him into trouble as well. His studies of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso's Guernica were harmless enough, but Statues Die Too, an examination of African Negro art, asked why all the Negro statues in Paris were in anthropological museums and not in the Louvre? The answer was colonialism, and censors paralyzed the film with a ban that has never been removed.

After Hiroshima, Mon Amour was released in 1959, Resnais was acknowledged as the absolute top drop of the New Wave. Suddenly besieged by writers, producers and actors, he patiently met them all, using sidewalk cafes as his office, stacking people up at nearby tables to wait for an audience. Unmarried and electrically attractive to women, he goes on single-mindedly making movies. His method on the set, for all his avantgardism, remains imbued with fundamental techniques learned in his childhood. Then, curiously enough, he paid more than casual attention to imported American comic strips (Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates), studying the cartoonists' skills in telling their stories through images. "Now," he will tell an actor softly. "Now--do it like Mandrake the Magician?" That, after all, is how Alain Resnais does it.

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