The "intellectual hypnosis" brought about by an overly perfect sense of aesthetics
Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961) is one of the most beautiful, and at the same time, the most "drowsy" films in cinematic history
Even Jean-Luc Godard is quite sleepy, but unlike his films, there are no outlandish jump cuts, pop-culture political slogans, or excessive music to wake the audience. Baroque palace hotels, endless corridors, geometrically trimmed gardens, and the solemn melodies of organs—everything on screen is governed by perfect symmetry and mathematical silence. The "perfectly still sculptures" of ancient gods and humans are lined up endlessly and orderly, and to my personal impression, it bears a slight resemblance to the Vatican Museums
The characters stand like emotionless sculptures, and the monologues loop endlessly. This "perfect beauty" and "lack of change" robs the audience of any sense of real tension, creating an irresistible hypnotic effect. But only those who fight off that drowsiness and stare intently at the screen with heavy eyelids will come face to face with a terrifyingly solid "materiality."
The lead actress, Delphine Seyrig, is wearing Gabrielle Chanel's haute couture
"An aging Chanel" hacks the avant-garde
In 1961, Chanel, in her late 70s, was facing harsh criticism in France since her return in 1954, being labeled an "outdated relic of the past." Meanwhile, the film world was at the height of the Nouvelle Vague, which was breathing new life into realism and street photography
When Chanel refused to commission new costumes for the film and instead offered existing collections from her atelier, critics at the time were critical. They said the costumes were "bourgeois and too elegant" and "too classic (conservative) for an avant-garde film."
However, that very sense of incongruity was precisely what director Resnais and Chanel were aiming for
In a labyrinth where the concept of time collapses, Chanel's dresses deodorize the raw emotions and sense of everyday life from "real people," functioning as "walking sculptures that will never grow old." Normally, clothing is a tool to assist human movement, but in Marienbad, the dresses exist to liberate people from movement and fix them into perfect "still images."
As soon as the film was released, the dresses and the asymmetrical "Marienbad cut (bow)" swept salons around the world. The aging couturier, who had been criticized as a "relic of his time," turned the experimental apparatus of avant-garde cinema to his advantage, brilliantly proving that his style was a timeless "eternal modernity."
A "fictional armor" to shut out reality
Why was such an inorganic yet beautiful space necessary?
A man claims, "We met last year at Marienbad," while a woman denies knowing such a man. It is never revealed what is real memory and what is hallucination. In this ambiguous world, the geometric garden and Chanel dress are the ultimate shelter from the harsh and chaotic "reality."
The real world is full of murky emotions, absurdity, aging, and death (noise). Women tried to protect their selves from the absurdity of reality by hiding themselves in perfect dresses and geometry
In a space cut off from the outside world, dressed in a perfect gown, they engage in meaningless card games. This is entirely synonymous with how we in modern society try to protect ourselves from the harsh realities of society by adorning ourselves with sophisticated high-end brands and confine ourselves to minimalist spaces stripped of the mundane aspects of everyday life
The madness of stripping away the body for the sake of the ideology of clothing
Normally, clothing is made to fit the human body. However, true fashion icons in history have always brilliantly reversed this subject-object relationship. Gabrielle Chanel's madness, which hacked "time and reality" through film, was rightly inherited half a century later by Karl Lagerfeld, who rebuilt the Chanel empire
In the early 2000s, Lagerfeld, then in his late 60s, was struck by the extremely slim silhouettes presented by Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme. To wear those delicate, youthful clothes, he shed 42 kg in just over a year
It goes beyond simply "adjusting one's body to fit clothes"—it's an irreversible transformation of one's own physical form
To shave away at one's own body and transform into a solid sculpture (material) to enter into the "ideology of a new era" that is Eddie's clothing. Coco, who hacked movies in her 70s, and Karl, who modified his own body in his 60s, have in common a cold, almost maddening obsession with treating clothes not merely as "cloth to wear," but as "absolute armor (weapon)" to confront the world with their own aesthetics and desires
A night of confronting a solid aesthetic sense
If you fall asleep while watching "Last Year at Marienbad," it's not a failure of the film. It's because the noise of human emotions and story has been completely eliminated, and the purity of beauty has been elevated to the extreme, making it impossible for the human brain to tolerate the silence
Fighting off sleepiness, I gazed at the unnaturally elongated angles of the shadows on the screen and followed the swaying of Chanel's black chiffon
Chanel's unwavering determination, which, despite being criticized as "outdated" in the past, stood still in time and became the origin of the "reversal of roles between clothing and body" that later led to Karl Lagerfeld's physical transformation, is the very essence of the "solid beauty" that continues to fascinate us even after more than half a century
Tonight, once again, I will surrender myself to the majestic sounds of the Baroque organ, drifting on waves of pleasant hypnosis, and descending deep into that perfectly geometric labyrinth
