Last Year at Marienbad

Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961) is Alain Resnais' French-Italian drama you can watch online on iFILM. Inside a vast baroque hotel of mirrored halls and frozen guests, a man insists to a woman that the two of them met here a year ago.

She remembers nothing. He keeps adding detail — where they stood, what was promised, what almost happened — and the more he talks, the harder his account is to dismiss, though nothing confirms it. Did the affair occur, or is he inventing a shared past out loud? The film never settles it. Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi and Sacha Pitoëff drift through the corridors like figures inside someone else's dream.

The screenplay came from Alain Robbe-Grillet, a founder of the French nouveau roman, and together they collapsed cinematic time: past, present and pure invention run as a single seamless stream. It took the Golden Lion at Venice and still splits viewers between the hypnotized and the exasperated. If you like films that pose a riddle and refuse the answer, this one is for you. Stream Last Year at Marienbad (1961) online on iFILM.