Playroom (11): Last Year In Marienbad

A hotel arranges its corridors as if memory were an architect with an obsession for right angles. Rooms repeat with such courtesy that the body begins to suspect it has been here before even when it has just arrived. Ceilings carry stucco that refuses to age. Mirrors wait in their frames like obedient witnesses who have rehearsed their silence. Carpets hush steps into compliance. A garden holds rigid parterres as if the earth had signed a contract against weather. People move through this order with the measured caution of figures invited to a ceremony without knowing its purpose. The camera glides and the glide becomes the only form of kindness tolerated in this place. When it stops, time thickens. When it turns, certainty must adopt another posture. The hotel is the precise instrument by which a story is denied even as it insists upon happening.

A man speaks as if speech could compel recollection into a shape fit for a story. He repeats sentences until repetition gives them a ceremonial weight that replaces truth. A woman listens with a politeness that could be refusal dressed as patience. Another man observes with the calm of one who trusts that possession is a law more robust than memory. Between them the hotel continues to be where the power is. The camera practises the geometry of gliding as if movement could be thought made visible. It passes mirrors and doors and statues with the courtesy of a librarian who has memorised the catalogue but refuses to gossip about it. In such company words become shy of promising and images accept the burden of suggestion.

Rooms do not simply contain. They dictate a grammar. A bar insists on conversation pitched to glass and to the slow consent of ice. A theatre offers the possibility that performance might finally gather the loose fibres of the day. A chapel of ornament persuades visitors to lower their voices as if the invented gods of decor were as demanding as any other. The garden is ruled by perspective and by the vanity of avenues that do not know how to stop. In this decorum the self is a costume that fits better than the body it disguises. The woman understands this and uses stillness the way others use eloquence. The man understands only that a sentence, once launched, cannot be recalled without shame. He seeks the pause that will save him and finds instead another corridor.

The man says they met last year and that a promise was made at the edge of a statue and at the foot of a staircase and at a balcony that overlooks a geometry too stern to forgive hesitation. The woman says nothing or says that he is mistaken or says that she is not the person he believes her to be. Each version enjoys the right to be true because each can be placed inside these rooms without strain. He offers images as if images were receipts. She lets the images demonstrate their failure to become guarantees. The other man listens to both with the authority of a player who has never lost, which is a kind of stupidity refined by success. The hotel hears everything and keeps nothing safe.

Time in this world has been trained to walk backwards while facing forward. Scenes recur with an alteration so slight it might be only the difference that fatigue makes when it erases the edge of a memory. A shot repeats and the most faithful spectator is forced to confess that it is not the same. Light has turned modest or cruel by a degree. A phrase has gained a syllable or lost the will to be persuasive. The effect is not puzzle but pressure. The minutes insist upon equality and therefore upon doubt. If a fact refuses to soften its borders, the film moves past it until it learns manners.A game is played in a corner as an assurance that reason is still allowed in the house. Sticks are arranged in rows and removed according to the rule that pretends to be fate. The men who play discover that victory is the sort of certainty that cannot be invited to dinner. It arrives whether one wishes it or not. The man who wins wins always. He explains nothing. His patience demonstrates why others surrender before the last stick is taken. The game performs the marriage of chance and necessity that the rooms perform with a tidier accent. The woman watches the ritual and learns what kind of law governs this place. The law prefers numbers to faces.The woman walks through a gallery where shadows behave as if the sun had learned how to keep secrets. A whisper follows her that might be his or might be the ventilation of a building that has given up on ordinary air. She stops before a mirror that has remembered more faces than any person could endure. The reflection offers a delay during which the story could reconsider itself. She neither confirms nor denies. Identity is not a possession here. It is a room that others can borrow.

He is certain because certainty is the only defence against the hotel. He narrates their earlier meeting in fragments that aspire to continuity. There was a theatre and a room and a corridor that never admitted to being a corridor because it preferred to be a sentence. There was a garden where statues held gestures at the exact moment before decision. There was a door that opened on command and another that knew how to resist. He speaks with the tone of a person who wants to be obeyed by facts. The more he commands the more the rooms smile with the silence of good servants who will not be bullied into testimony.

The third man is perhaps a husband or perhaps the owner of a certain tone that husbands have recruited for centuries as proof. He plays and wins and watches his companion fail at the only game he is prepared to understand. He moves with the authority of those who do not need to consult their reflection to confirm the boundaries of their body. He holds the woman by being the anchor of a world that believes in contracts. He is less a rival than the standing army of present tense. Where he is there is no last year.

Memory in this film does not offer the softness of nostalgia. It operates like an architect who has lost the first plan and now erects a structure from available fragments. A ceiling from one place, a staircase from another, a sentence from a third. The work holds together only because symmetry forgives error when error is disciplined. The man reuses lines as if repetition could certify them. The woman allows repetition to expose their poverty. The third man has no need of memory. He is made of law and therefore of now.Statues are deployed as a language no one has the education to read. Figures reach toward what is not there and usurp the sky by freezing its gestures in stone. Lovers appear to be caught in the act of refusing themselves. Bodies lean in obedience to a balance the living cannot replicate. The camera looks up as if trying to graduate into their patience. The garden in which they stand has been trimmed until even grass admits that it must stand still. The effect is not beauty but a discipline beyond persuasion.

The soundtrack is the house speaking. An organ proposes that solemnity is not a matter of belief but of amplitude. Notes hold each other as if frightened to proceed alone. The music returns with the fidelity of a priest who is not sure anyone is listening but refuses to abbreviate the service. It permits the rooms to feel ancient even as they prove that age here is the triumph of housekeeping rather than of time. Noise from the outside world cannot penetrate because the outside world may not exist. If it does it is merely another salon with less polite windows. Costume participates in the governance. Dresses marry severity to grace. Suits are armour that operates by scent and by the softness of cloth. The man who narrates owns a hat as if to reassure himself that his head remains a visible authority. The woman wears a quick intelligence disguised as fabric. The other man does not need disguise. He is his suit and the suit is the pact between money and silence. In this clothing bodies move with the careful speed dictated by floors that would rather be unmarked.

Doors manage ethics. Some open because the film requires mercy. Some close because the film requires duration. A key appears and disappears with the indifferent magic of objects that know they are the real protagonists. A handle shines with the ritual of being polished by hands that will never be invited to appear. The man knocks and receives permission or he knocks and receives delay. The woman waits within a frame in which waiting is the only proof of life. The third man arrives by not needing to knock. The room opens to him by instinct.

One can say that the film is about seduction and refusal and the way a promise survives on the breath even when it cannot survive in a room. One can say that it is about the residual duties of the past and about the glamour of obedience when obedience is written in marble. One can say it is about a woman protecting the right to determine the cadence of her own consent. All these are accurate and none sufficient. The work shelters another difficulty. It proposes that the present is a quarrel among versions of the past carried by bodies who have mislaid the receipt.

Occasionally the camera escapes outdoors where the sky cannot be domesticated and yet appears to have agreed to the treaty. Trees hold their leaves with military quiet. A path promises to take the foot away from the house and then leads it back by a perspective trick older than hope. The woman turns a corner and he is there because corners in this place were designed for such returns. She turns again and he is not because absence is as perfectly engineered as presence. The garden teaches that freedom is a hallway with windows.

The logic of the piece refuses trauma as an explanation. If violence exists it skulks in the comfort of certainty. A gun appears in a version of a memory as if memory were tired of being spoken to softly. Perhaps it is fired. Perhaps only the statue hears. The film does not become an alibi for the ugliness of men. It allows the smaller ugliness of turning a sentence into a trap. The woman practices the only available defence which is the courage not to be completed by another person’s narrative.

The hotel is a place where death has been converted into etiquette. People stand in tableaux that feel like wakes without corpses. Applause never happens because there is no occasion for honest applause. Eyes watch eyes with the ritual curiosity of guests at a wedding who doubt the ceremony belongs to the couple on display. The man speaks the way a priest speaks when he is not sure the sacraments have retained their force. The woman receives this liturgy and refuses to grant it the name of history.

Cinema here is the most exacting of hosts. Tracking shots behave like the hand of a clock pretending to be a caress. Cuts are small acts of amnesty. Focus is the law by which the room selects what may exist. If an object is not in focus perhaps it is not there or perhaps it is there in a future that has borrowed the corridor of the present. The effect upon the spectator is a courtesy that becomes an accusation. You wanted story. You are given space. Make your peace.

Language is used as a filter that clarifies and dulls in the same measure. The man repeats a phrase until its nouns crumble. The woman repeats a refusal until refusal grows luminous. The other man speaks seldom and therefore his sentences are obeyed by the furniture first and by the people later. Dialogue seems to have been written by a clerk who believes in accounting but is still learning irony. Words do not rescue. They inventory. They assist the hotel in its cataloguing of attempts.If a moral insists upon being found it is this. A person’s certainty about another person is the most fragile furniture in any house. It will not bear weight. The man bears down upon it and so the chair collapses. He rises and bears down again because collapse looks to him like the drama that will finally persuade. The woman understands chairs. She sits or she stands according to what the wood can accept. She keeps her balance and this offends those who mistake tottering for authenticity. The other man keeps his feet upon polished floors because he has never been required to learn balance.

At times the film grants a hallucination that others would call a flashback. A bedroom is the colour of quiet and the windows speak a dialect of light that has the courtesy to make faces legible. A bed holds two possibilities with the justice of a court that has not yet assembled a jury. The man says we were here. The woman says perhaps. The third man exists as a promise of an interruption that either has already happened or will arrive as soon as the silence agrees to it. The scene is merciful because it allows us to rehearse compassion without locating guilt.

The architecture of the voiceover operates like a steward who walks ahead announcing rooms we are about to enter. It claims more than it can prove and then claims less as if ashamed. It likes to name furnishings and to place people as though they were ornaments whose proper location must be determined by trial. It repeats a list of possibilities until the boredom of possibility does the work of meaning. The voice is not the author. It is one of the hotel staff.

In the theatre a play is shown or not shown. Curtains appear like eyelids trained not to blink. The audience behaves like a monument to attention. What they watch is another room. What they hear is another list. The man believes the show is addressed to him because he recognises his own sentences when spoken by strangers. The woman recognises nothing and therefore recognises everything. The third man uses the interval to play and to win again. The performance ends and no one leaves because leaving would be too decisive for a space that prefers prolonged hesitation.

Light behaves as a principle. It does not flatter the face that begs to be flattered. It overexposes guilt and underexposes certainty. It makes the angles of the hotel the real subject by erasing the curiosity of the eye that would like to be allowed to rest upon skin. When a doorway glows it is not a promise of exit. It is a measure of how far a body must travel to discover that elsewhere is another salon where the carpet knows your name. The light across the garden plays a game with shadows in which the rules are respected even when they are not understood.

We are allowed to imagine that outside this hotel a city exists with trams and bakeries and rain. The film refuses to spend even a minute there. It insists that the paradise of decorum is the true scene of our latest confusion. The woman was asked to remember and to obey and to bless the past by consenting to perform it again. She prefers to let forgetting do its labour in peace. The man condemns forgetting as betrayal while using it to modify the facts in his favour. The other man has forgotten nothing because the present is an excuse he never needs.

The costumes of speech continue. He says we planned to leave. She says leave where. He names cities that might not exist and seasons that never arrived. She names nothing and gains strength by naming nothing. He approaches and learns that distance is a right. He retreats and the room grows larger as if rewarding her for the maintenance of scale. The third man waits in the next room because authority never hurries. When he enters, time sits up and smooths its dress.

The camera discovers a corridor in which the floor has outlived the shoes that tried to assert themselves. It travels, turning walls into sentences. The viewer walks with it and learns that walking is the only politics that matters in the kingdom of repetition. Each step is a refusal to be fixed by the earlier step. Each step is also an agreement to respect the design. Freedom here is learned as the ability to belong to a rhythm without becoming a statue.

At the bar an encounter is staged with the precision of a treaty signing. Glasses are filled to identical levels. Hands approach and withdraw as if coached by a team of instructors who accept only small gestures. The man says I waited for you. The woman says I did not ask you to. He hears the seduction of conquest in his own voice and decides it is virtue. She hears the labour of resistance in her own silence and decides it is simply the temperature of the hour. The other man pays and does not move.

The hotel is not a metaphor for Europe or for class or for history. It is the surface upon which the smallest manners reveal their corrosive or their saving powers. People who have learned to step softly can live here without damage. People who believe that feeling should be loud cut the carpet until threads rise to punish the ankle. The woman steps softly and therefore survives. The man wants the corridor to announce his resolve and so the corridor modifies his echo into a whisper he cannot hear.

Sometimes the shot freezes into a still community of bodies as if time had grown tired and decided to sit. The stillness is not death. It is rehearsal for a better stillness. In these tableaux the woman’s face refuses to become an inscription. The man’s face tries. The other man has no face in these minutes because necessity has no portrait. The eye of the camera moves among them like a guest who has lost interest in conversation and is now in search of a coat.Architecture produces belief as harvest. The spectator begins to trust that the hotel knows what it is doing. With this trust comes the suspicion that the people do not. The film is not cruel. It restores to the woman the only protection that can resist architecture which is the right not to be known. The man cannot accept this right because he confuses knowing with saving. The third man respects the right because rights are the currency he has always counted.

What then of love? If it appears it appears as the memory of a promise to leave and the knowledge that leaving is simply a new room with a different mirror. The film is not cynical. It grants the longing to be elsewhere its full dignity and then refuses to reduce the existing world to a villain. The garden is not the enemy because it is formal. It is only a form that some can occupy without becoming furniture and others cannot. The woman understands this first because understanding here is another word for air.

At last there is the suggestion of departure. A car waits. A path with a line of trees leads to a checkpoint in the distance where perspective becomes law. The man believes this is the future. The woman turns once to regard the facade with the justice of a person who has paid for her room and will leave no debt. The third man watches with the calm of one for whom arrival and departure are categories invented for the convenience of waiters. The camera allows the path to lengthen. The night collaborates. The map of the garden revises itself and pronounces the word soon.

What follows is not proof. It is the grace of an ending that knows it is not the end. The car moves or does not. The garden remains or is left behind. The woman may have remembered after all or may have discovered that remembering is the most dangerous invitation a stranger can deliver. The man is either redeemed by her consent or freed by her refusal. The other man is either correct or unimportant. The hotel keeps all versions in storage like costumes that will be needed again next season.

We leave with the only confidence permitted to a spectator who has been taught patience by architecture. Space remembers better than we do. Our bodies which believed that sensation would guarantee truth learn that truth prefers the courtesy of forms. The woman remains not because she is trapped but because she has recognised that freedom without measure is simply another myth that men use to forgive themselves. The man performs his last sentence with the splendour of a voice that has at last exhausted itself. The third man holds the rule in reserve in case someone needs reminding that now is always greedy.

The film continues after the credits because corridors continue regardless of ownership. In another salon a new man will begin a story he is sure belongs to him. A new woman will permit or deny or refuse to grant the question relevance. A new ruler of the game will win again without enjoying victory. Statues will overlook the proceedings with the serenity of elements that have outlived the nerves of humans. The music will hold notes like breath practised by those who have survived a long swim. We have been dismissed and we continue to walk as if still expected.

To discuss this is to risk inventing a simpler object than the one that stood before us. Better to imitate the method the film taught. Walk the corridor at a pace that matchmaking might mistake for hesitation and that knowledge will respect as care. Do not raise the voice inside a room that has so much older speech embedded in its plaster. If asked to recall, consent to the labour but not to the tyranny of one version. If asked to promise, place the promise in the garden and examine whether the perspective quickens or stifles it. If asked to leave, regard the path until the trees answer.The faces recede and the hotel retains its authority. One might call this cruelty. It is simply the justice due to things that have kept their side of the bargain. They were built to outlast our confusions. They have done so elegantly. The woman leaves an imprint on the air where her reluctance taught patience to the room. The man leaves a heavy grammar that will haunt mirrors only until the next dawn. The third man leaves nothing discernible because the present refuses to store obviousness. In the morning the beds will be made and the corridors polished and the game arranged with fresh sticks and the invitation will be written again on the carpet.

At the limit the film invites the spectator to replace nostalgia with attention. Nostalgia converts the past into an argument. Attention allows the present to resist conversion. The woman in her final reserve is the figure of such attention. She does not become symbol or fetish. She remains the one person who refuses to accept that a claim upon her can be retroactively transformed into destiny. The man in his tireless narration is the warning that love when unable to recognise another will turn the most courteous rooms into prisons. The other man is the reminder that certainty wins games and loses the season.

So one returns to the opening corridor. One hears again the catalogue of ceilings and of doors that open onto other doors. One sees again the garden set at a distance that flatters and humiliates the eye. One hears again the voice that believes description will enforce reality. One waits again for the moment in which the woman will say yes or no or neither. One watches the game and realises that even losing would be a kind of relief because it would introduce change. The film refuses relief and in doing so rescues us from the childish expectation that clarity is owed where power is pleased to be obscure.

Everything that can be carried from this has been carried quietly. A respect for rooms as the final honest witnesses. A suspicion of certainty when it uses tenderness as a disguise. A love for those who keep their silence not as a punishment but as a breathing space that language can learn to share. A recognition that repetition is neither hell nor theatre but the method by which attention is trained. An acceptance that leaving is sometimes the politest way to remain equal to oneself.

The hotel remains on its plot of land which may be nowhere. Its windows keep their exact rectangles against weather. Its staff continue the liturgy of civility that makes human vanity survivable. Its gardens maintain the last straight lines in a world addicted to detours. The people who once walked there have become our recollection and our recollection will fail. The building forgives us our failure and continues to teach the angle at which a staircase asks to be climbed. It is enough. It is the truth that a corridor can teach to anyone willing to walk slowly.

And still the question remains whether the woman ever becomes the author of a sentence that does not need to defend itself. She chooses when to walk and when to stand and when to let a room finish speaking before she replies. Her authority looks passive because our eyes prefer thunder to tide. Yet the tide moves architecture over years and thunder only frightens. She refuses the conversion of her face into an emblem that would simplify the film into a parable. She refuses the sentence that would certify a past in which she had not been consulted. Her refusal is not a wall. It is a door that opens only onto the present.

Mirrors are used without flattery. They do not disclose souls. They reproduce angles until we tire and learn to look past the seduction of likeness. One corridor multiplies into a regiment of silver rectangles and the eye realises that to be seen is not the same as to be known. The woman passes and the woman divided by glass follows like a militia that will never take up arms. The man seeks confirmation and receives geometry. The other man avoids mirrors because power prefers surfaces that show only obedience.

The piano hidden in one salon proposes another ethic. Keys are pressed and the room humbles itself to listen. The phrase is not sentimental. It advances with the confidence of someone who has counted the steps from door to door and found them always the same. Music here refuses to be illustrative. It is climate. It rescues speech from the burden of having to prove every claim and it rescues silence from the accusation of being evasive. When the phrase ceases the furniture is honest enough to admit loss.

There is one corridor unlike the rest, a longer distance that invites exhaustion. The camera travels it as if escorting time to an appointment it would prefer to miss. Along the way doors appear pretending to be solutions. Each opens upon another arrangement of carpets and chairs auditioning for permanence. The woman pauses at the far end and accepts that reaching the end of something is only a change of prepositions. Behind, in front, across, within. The map shifts and she does not protest. She has learned to prefer verbs to nouns.

When night gathers the hotel does not grow kinder. It becomes more honest. Lamps refuse to imitate the sun and so faces relinquish their masks. The man believes darkness will make promises obedient. He chooses a tone that has worked before in other cities. The woman hears the rehearsal and steps back to the balcony where air has not been taught to applaud. Below, the parterres draft their black laws. Above, a ceiling rehearses a fresco that someone once decided not to finish. This unfinishedness is the only mercy the building grants.

The spectator is continually invited to decide whether a scene is memory or invention or the third category that has no word because language is trained to settle for binaries. The correct answer is never demanded. The film trusts the consequences of attention. If attention tends toward mercy the woman is released into the minute where she can be equal to herself. If attention tends toward conquest the man is provided with the illusion of victory. The hotel is indifferent to both quick outcomes. It preserves its climate and waits.

If one asks why the game returns in rooms where no one seems to enjoy games the answer is that winning is the least interesting of interests. The man who wins has rehearsed the algorithm by which sticks submit to number. He has the face of law. He runs the world in miniature and the miniature answers correctly. He is never surprised and is therefore the most lonely person present. The others continue to play in order to remember surprise. The woman watches and learns what kind of certainty will not be allowed to occupy her.

At a banquet a toast is proposed to tradition or to beauty or to the art of hospitality and the glasses rise with practised grace. The woman raises hers with the exact minimum required by civility. The man overperforms and is betrayed by the echo his glass makes against the others. The third man drinks without toasting because the future does not drink to anybody. The scene is written on the surface of plates that will be washed in the back room by hands we never see. The hotel sustains the ritual by confirming that nothing has changed.

Perhaps the most disturbing knowledge the work offers is that architecture can manufacture season. The same hall looks winter to those who have been condemned and summer to those who believe themselves desired. The woman experiences both climates and learns to carry a coat that is not visible. The man has only one season and it is called persuasion. The third man has no season and therefore does not age. The spectator turns cold or warm according to the temperature of their certainty. The film remains measured like stone that has decided to be civil.

At the end one more corridor, one more garden, one more sentence half promised. The car waits with the patience of a machine that understands the respect owed to hesitation. The woman turns again and the white facade refuses to disclose any memory not already earned. She decides as people decide when there is no audience. The man offers a final grammar. The third man keeps the peace by existing. The camera withdraws with the modesty due to choices that would be harmed by witnesses. Night accepts. Trees remember. The path continues whether used or not.