Last Year in Marienbad
Alain Resnais’ newly restored Last Year at Marienbad returns to the Venice Film Festival and European cinemas this month. Its lead – French actress Delphine Seyrig – was dressed by Coco Chanel in a style and fashion tour de force that, writes stephen short, still dazzles today
FRENCH DIRECTOR ALAIN RESNAIS’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) holds a special place in the pantheon of cinema and has been called the most divisive motion picture in the medium’s history.
To the cogniscenti, it’s avant-garde at its most exaggerated edges of experimentation – film as art, an unsurpassable journey into a new paradigm, in which Resnais frees his mind and eye from the constraints of conventional filmmaking. To the naysayers it’s 94 minutes of pretentious, incomprehensible, non-linear guff, whose protagonists partake in decadent parlour games in which any of the scenes could be interspliced at will, without endangering our limited understanding of the story’s outcome, or lack of it – as though Resnais wholeheartedly set out to frustrate any illumination on the part of the viewer. Influential critic Pauline Kael of The New Yorker described Marienbad as “aimless, high-style moral turpitude passing itself off as the universal human condition”.
Resnais co-scripted Marienbad with France’s leading nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet (the latter nominated for an Academy Award in 1963 for his effort), and while their views diverged as the project progressed, they started out on common ground. The film evolves around a plot whose premise is so flimsy it might as well be rumour. Which it is. A glacial French woman (Delphine Seyrig, who is referred to as “A”, – characters in Marienbad are never addressed by name), is wooed by a handsome Italian man (Giorgio Albertazzi, X) who tries to convince her they had a romantic encounter 12 months ago when they met, and that she promised to elope with him. But A claims she’s never seen him before and we can’t tell whether she’s lying or might have even forgotten. Then there’s a third
character (Sacha Pitoeff, known as M), whose presence we can’t entirely account for. He could be her husband, or another suitor or lover, we are never told. And that’s it.
As these insouciant aristos roam or “haunt” – they might be phantocrats - the grounds of an ancient Bohemian castle turned luxurious hotel (not a single scene is shot in Marienbad, but three Bavarian castles were used for shooting), a psychological war wages. It’s one Resnais fuels by means of fracture and repetition – an individual scene will see Seyrig look over her shoulder midway through speech only to be standing in a separate room next shot in the same stance midway through the same conversation, or one similar but with slight shifts in emphasis. Sometimes, the same scenes are restaged with actors in separate outfits, at different angles, with less or more furniture and shot at length, in leisurely tracking shots that afford Resnais the chance to highlight the baroque details of the property’s corridors and gardens. The whole space of the hotel transforms in relation to psychoanalytical aspects of the story scene by scene.
Did they even meet? Midway, X does produce evidence to substantiate his story – a series of photographs – the revelation of which appears to confuse A, who can’t decide whether to deny or
“DELPHINE IS WONDERFUL IN MARIENBAD WITH HER ABSENT, MYSTERIOUS DEMEANOUR” Karl Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel
accept his invitation and journey into an inchoate future portentous with romance and tragedy.
In this gallimaufrous zoetrope of simultaneous past, present and future, the recondite mash-up of reality versus memory, Resnais went for broke. A former director of art documentaries, whose fiction filmmaking coincided with the French Nouvelle Vague or New Wave and included Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Day, he wanted the film not to tell a story but directly transpose how the characters perceive the world they encounter, in all its arbitrary subjectivity. For a film festooned with artifice by the arch-load, Marienbad is a brilliant unravelling of how our mind’s eye “sees”, interprets and reinterprets the world around it. By so doing, Resnais was trying to develop the potential of cinema as an autonomous art outright. As such, you’re not meant to follow Marienbad, you just lie back and enjoy it.
Which, given the influence of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the high priestess of couture classicism, on the looks of Seyrig, makes for heady aesthetic indulgence. Ask Hong Kong–based Taiwanese director Yonfan for his recollections of Marienbad and in a snap he’s a picture of fashionable instantaneousness. “The dress. The dress. No one can forget the dress. My God, those feathers!” Karl Lagerfeld, creative head of Chanel since 1983, took Marienbad as a theme for the house’s 2011 spring/summer ready-towear collection, shown in the Grand Palais to the strains of a live orchestra; fashionistas and fashion commentators thought it the Kaiser’s best-ever work for the house.
“Delphine was one of Chanel’s biggest inspirations,” says Lagerfeld of that collection and the film’s influence. “She is wonderful in Marienbad with her absent, mysterious demeanour.” And like Yonfan, Lagerfeld’s struck by the plumage. “There were feathers and I admit it inspired me, as before I had never thought to do something using that inspiration,” he says. And given his penchant for detail,
he’s also keen to point out one factual matter.
“In the film, Marienbad does not exist. It was Nymphenburg [Palace] in the film.”
Marienbad has continued to exert modern and contemporary spin. Stanley Kubrick acknowledged a huge debt to the film when he made The Shining, photographers from Helmut Newton to Irving Penn took a lead from it for their fashion shoots, while British filmmaker, painter and maverick Peter Greenaway calls it “the most successful film of all time” and the most influential on his own. David Lynch acknowledges the debt in Inland Empire. Meantime, British pop group Blur’s “To The End” video also pays homage to Marienbad’s surreal and striking aesthetic, while fashion’s Marc Jacobs and Diane von Furstenberg, and many of their ilk, are committed “Marienbaders”.
Most recently, if you’d visited Hong Kong’s David Zwirner gallery at H Queen’s this summer, you’d have witnessed Singaporean-born, Berlinbased artist Ming Wong’s video installation
Next Year/L’Année Prochaine, which reinterprets Resnais’ film; Wong plays both the male and female leads for the encounter across multiple venues in Shanghai’s French Concession – including the Marienbad Café and Fuxing Park, the latter based on the 19th-century design of the Parc de la Tête d’Or in Lyon, France. Wong’s opaque treatment of the subject, in which he splices scenes from Shanghai with those of the original film, locates the work beyond Bavaria or Shanghai, in a newly ambiguous spatiotemporal dimension. Resnais, no doubt, and Chanel, who unlike most designers loved to be copied, would have approved.
Stylistically, Resnais’ move to hire Chanel was bold. He didn’t want Seyrig dressed in traditional film-created costumes, but a wardrobe relevant to everyday life; one that would evoke the allure of 1920s cinema stars yet mesh with modern, timeless elegance. So Chanel took pieces from that season’s haute couture collection and dressed Seyrig with them, simultaneously making the actress an ultra-chic fashion icon.
Seyrig’s wardrobe is distinguished by layers of tulle, delicate lace, wisps of chiffon, and cascading feathers – see the diaphanous peignoir and black cape, the white cape, the X-strapped back, all of which kiss and dance and drift their way like shadows through the sumptuous corridors, gilded rooms and majestic gardens. There’s also a metallic suit with three-quarter sleeves that screams craftsmanship. And the killer app is Chanel’s accessories; twotoned shoes with kitten heels, chain belts, costume jewels and pearls – of course, pearls – at every turn and trinket, all classic Chanel codes, hallmarks of her singular haute. The black chiffon number alone became the “dress à la Marienbad”, a consecration for Chanel’s little black dress, and Seyrig’s “Marienbad hairstyle” was copied by women across America and Europe.
Resnais and Chanel set off not just a trend but a new philosophy of costume design. In their wake, many New Wave directors encouraged their actresses not to wear costumes but everyday clothes, often taken from their own wardrobes. Foremost among them was Brigitte Bardot, who told Chanel quite explicitly that she “wanted the same dress as Delphine Seyrig”.
Chanel was no stranger to the world of artistic creation and cinema. From as early as 1912 she was making hats for actress Gabrielle Dorziat, who was appearing in the play Bel Ami in Paris, and in the early 1920s she had lent support to Diaghilev
“WE TALK OF THE DORIC ORDER, OR THE CORINTHIAN ORDER, AND SO TOO, THERE IS A CHANEL ORDER” Romy Schneider, actress and star of Boccaccio ’70
and the Ballet Russe for The
Rite of Spring, and costumes for
Le Train Bleu; for Jean Cocteau plays and his first film, Le Sang d’un Poète (Blood of a Poet) in 1930; for the ballet Bacchannale (1939), whose set was designed by painter Salvador Dalí; for director Jean Renoir’s film La Marseillaise (1938) and what would become his masterpiece, La Règle du Jeu (1939); and for Marcel Carné’s film Le Quai des Brumes (1938).
There was a brief flirtation with Hollywood when, in 1931, she signed a US$1 million contract with Samuel Goldwyn of United Artists, to produce high-fashion costumes for his female leads. Mayer thought he could increase box-office revenues in the US by promoting Paris fashions in his films. Chanel dressed Palmy Days (1931), Tonight or Never (1931) – in which she dressed a pregnant
Gloria Swanson in such a way that nobody watching the film noticed – and more than 30 outfits for The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932) – a Sex and the City–style romp, but the American relationship faltered and Gabrielle left describing Hollywood as “infantile” and as “the capital of bad taste”.
Meanwhile war intervened, causing Chanel to close her business in 1939, and she bided her time in Switzerland knowing that sales of Chanel No. 5 were sufficient to keep matters afloat. She reopened her salon more than a decade later on February 5, 1954 (five was always her favourite number, which she thought lucky) to a blaze of publicity. Fashion editors hailed the collection as an elegant functional riposte to the extravagance of Christian Dior’s New Look, which Chanel had thought regressive to women’s advancement. Again, she had caught l’air du temps. Hélène Lazareff, founder
of Elle magazine in Paris, called Chanel a “feminist forerunner” and said her classic/contemporary style was ideal for “voting, wageearning, independent women, with no time to waste – especially when it came to choosing their clothes”. Dior’s new look came and went and never returned. Chanel endured. And directors took note.
After the war, Chanel dressed Jeanne Moreau in Les Amants (1958) and Elevator to the Gallows (1958). The two became close friends, and Italian director Luchino Visconti, also a close friend, introduced her to actress Romy Schneider for the first time in 1961, the year of Marienbad. Chanel went on to dress Schneider for Les Choses de la Vie (1970) and the same year Visconti put Chanel in charge of Schneider’s wardrobe for Boccaccio ’70, in which the actress wore a succession of Chanel bouclé suits, two-tone sling-back shoes and strings of pearls. Schneider became a Chanel convert. “Chanel taught me everything without a word,” she said. “Chanel is unlike any other designer ... we talk of the Doric order, or the Corinthian order, and so too, there is a
Chanel order.”
For Seyrig – a fiercely independent woman and latterly a feminist, whose mother was Swiss and the niece of linguist and semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure, the role in Marienbad was a radical transformation. In addition to her acting style, voice and gait, she traded in her curls for short and fringed hair, not unlike Gabrielle herself. With her modern acting style and gaze, she established herself as a counterpoint to the solar sensuality of Brigitte Bardot, an icon of the time.
Thereafter, Seyrig worked with François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman on stage and film projects, and was seldom seen not wearing Chanel. When she received the award for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in Resnais’ follow-up, Muriel, she wore Chanel. A close friendship developed between Gabrielle and Delphine and a decade later, Seyrig praised Chanel for “blending elegance and comfort” and allowing “women to feel as comfortable as men”, a subject dear to the actress. Gabrielle (who died in 1971) would no doubt have appreciated Seyrig’s 1977 production and directorial debut, Sois Belle et Tais-Toi, a documentary in which Seyrig interviewed actresses about exploitation and gender inequality in the film business.
Her friendship with Chanel might have been the spur for it. Gabrielle, never the shy, retiring type, once at her most erumpent declared: “I set the fashion for the very reason that I was the first 20th-century woman.” In that she wasn’t wrong. And that influence elevated Resnais’ masterpiece to such aesthetic altitude, that be it last year, next year, or any year for that matter, the unrelenting highfashionability of Marienbad never goes out of style.