Last Year at Marienbad

In an ornate baroque hotel populated by wealthy individuals and couples who socialize with one another, a man approaches a woman and claims they met the previous year at a similar resort (possibly Frederiksbad, Karlstadt, Marienbad, or Baden-Salsa) and had an affair. He asserts that she responded to his request to run away together by asking him to wait a year. The woman, however, insists she has never met the man. He attempts to remind her of their shared past, while she rebuffs him and contradicts his accounts. Between interactions with the woman, a second man, who may be her husband, asserts his dominance over the first by repeatedly defeating him in a game of Nim. Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts in time and location, the film explores the relationships among the three characters. Conversations and events are repeated in different parts of the building and grounds, accompanied by numerous tracking shots of the hotel's corridors with ambiguous and repetitive voice-overs. The film offers no definitive conclusion regarding what is real and what is imagined, but by the end, the woman relents and leaves the hotel with the first man.

Plot from Last Year at MarienbadCC BY-SA 4.0