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Rating: Hello everyone,
today I debut with a review of a hidden gem in cinema, little known to the majority, but also to the minority, which made me fall in love after watching it.
Basically, the plot is simple: we are in hotel A, where the vicissitudes of Mr. X (an excellent Albertazzi), Mrs. Y (beautiful Seyrig), and her husband Z (a disturbing character) unfold. Essentially, X and Y, according to X, met the previous year in the not-so-cheerful town of Marienbad, and it was love at first sight. The fact is that Y, already married, leaves X with the promise that after a year they would run away together, X and Y.
A year later, in hotel A, the two meet again (or perhaps they meet for the first time) and this is where the nuances begin. Who knows if what X says is true, that the two already know each other. Who knows if it's true that Y doesn't know X, and that X made everything up. Who knows if it's true that Y knows it's true and pretends not to remember.
The central theme is thus a possible, but extremely refined, adultery.
In the silent uproar of these murmurs, echoing off the walls of the static hotel, we find a formidable direction: strange we could say, decidedly unconventional.
Close-ups, static characters, immobility, nonsensical dialogues. Except for the protagonists, who isolate themselves from the mundane occurrences of the hotel, creating one entirely for themselves. At a certain point, it seems they are the only three staying there. The beginning of the work, in my opinion, is wonderful, with the voice describing the hotel for minutes and minutes, accompanied by an exploratory photography of it that leaves that sense of emptiness and alienation. The scene where X and Y are on the balcony almost impressed me, with the characters in the courtyard remaining completely still, like in a painting. Or when during the theatrical show, where the spectators freeze for minutes, only to resume their deliberate nonsensical speeches.
The "Nouvelle Vague," misunderstood, reigns over the film, leaving me literally ecstatic and alienated, in front of the images that flow: if you let yourself be drawn into the film, you no longer know what to think, you no longer know what to do, you no longer know what happened before. The film is irresistible and you fall in love at first sight, as happened to me.
For those who want to, but especially for those in Rome, this film (upon request) can be seen at the Cinema Azzurro Scipioni (Agosti's cinema). If there are few of you in the theater (very likely), you can ask them to put it on.
In conclusion, this is a must.
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Other reviews
By Valeriorivoli
This movie is a non-film, perhaps more akin to a hallucinatory videoclip avant la lettre.
Masterpiece of filmic oneirism, an editing so meticulous and at the same time idiosyncratic as to seem the prototype of the anti-film.
By smr
Pretentious and presumptuous like almost all French films, especially those by intellectual critics who, bored with writing, took up filmmaking.
A sort of charade for insiders. An encrypted code for bored intellectual snobs and cinephile snobboni.
