Search - Last Year at Marienbad on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Adult Situations Movie Release: 1961 DVD Release: 03/23/1999 Format: DVD - Black and White,Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV Audio Tracks: French, Italian Subtitles: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 34 mins Studio: Fox Lorber Members Wishing: 22 Genres: Avant-garde / Experimental, Psychological Drama, Surrealist Film See Also: Last Year at Marienbad [Criterion Collection], Last Year at Marienbad [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the movie is a riddle of seduction, a mercurial enigma darting between a present and past which may not even exist, let alone converge. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as an unnamed sophisticate attempting to convince a similarly nameless woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met and were romantically involved a year ago in the same enormous, baroque European hotel. In the end, it hardly matters -- they're not characters so much as pawns anyway. Hypnotically dreamlike, Last Year at Marienbad is a surrealist parody of Hollywood melodrama, a high-fashion romance with a dark, alien underbelly. According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence -- the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Delphine Seyrig - A
Giorgio Albertazzi - X
Sacha Pitoeff - M
Francoise Spira

Alain Resnais's influential art-house favorite Last Year at Marienbad comes to DVD with a widescreen transfer that preserves the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. French and Italian soundtracks are rendered in Dolby Digital Stereo. English subtitles are accessible. There are no supplemental materials of any consequence. Wellspring deserves credit for making this classic available on DVD, but the film does deserve better than this run-of-the-mill disc. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide