Word: marienbad
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FOUR men spend a weekend eating themselves to death in a grim, overdecorated mansion: the conceit has the imprint of an allegory by Bunuel, the echo of wild house parties in Italian movies of a decade ago, the teasing metaphysics of a "Last Year at Marienbad." Four men tied to a brotherhood pact that tests endurance --the premise is also a kinky Continental variation on "Deliverance...
During the summer of 1916, Franz and Felice spent a week together in Marienbad. If there was any physical intimacy between them, the letters make no allusion to it. One month after the announcement of the second engagement in July 1917, Kafka writes Felice of his first tubercular hemorrhage. He seems to have broken the news with a sense of relief. TB was not only a way out of marriage but, he believed, nature's final judgment-the fatal wound caused by his warring selves...
...security around passengers and planes, while police in each country put out dragnets for national guerrilla gangs. In the random nature of terror, the week's worst violence came from an unexpected quarter; ten Czech skyjackers held up a Slov-Air twin-engine L-410 flying from Marienbad to Prague, killed the pilot when he refused to change course, and forced the copilot to fly them to West Germany, where they were promptly arrested...
Elsewhere, Resnais has made more subtle acknowledgments. Suggesting his debt to the comics, he lists "Fearless Fosdick" in the credits of one film. Alfred Hitchcock, a hero of Resnais's, appears in Marienbad in an almost unnoticeable private joke: "We made a tribute to Hitchcock by putting his photographic silhouette in the hotel in Marienbad, waiting for an elevator which, of course, never comes...
Thus, although Resnais's own fascination with time pervades all his films, its handling varies according to the conception of the different script writers. Time in Hiroshima has the source of its order in the psychology of the main characters, whereas in Robbe-Grillet's Marienbad the order of time is more metaphysical than personal. Unlike either, Jorge Semprun's script for La Guerre est Finie demanded greater conventionality of form, with a focus on social reality rather than metaphysical complexity. In his treatment of time, then, Resnais peculiarly mixes continuity and flexibility...