The reason I titled this Hotel California, was because this place that they were staying at reminded me of the song where once you come in, you can't get out. With all the repeating of the sentences, and he kept saying that there were all these long hallways with no end. Also all the people with their mouths moving but nothing coming out. The music was very dramatic all the time, and the flash pictures of the woman kept making my mind think weird things. Like when she fell onto the bed and it showed her falling from like every angle around her, and when she died, it did the same thing except the picture seemed to change. It was like all of these people were ghosts stuck in this purgatory. It was very dream like, very much like a guy trapped in his own mind without knowing it. He just cannot win in this movie. He can't win the girl, he can't win the game, and he doesn't know what he wants.
He was very much obsessed with this girl that didn't seem to want anything to do with him. He wouldn't leave he alone the entire movie, and he had all of these photos of her in a drawer. And he kept losing the game to her husband. But if they seemed to know each other, and he seemed so in love with her, you'd think they would be comfortable with each other, so why the Vu formality? It's similar in Spanish, and we hardly ever use the formal tense of Spanish.
This movie really didn't make any sense to me at all. I know that we weren't suppose to try to catch the "moral of the story", but it's hard not to. We are so use to "getting something" out of the movies that we watch, that it's hard to watch a movie and not look for the plot of the story. I didn't feel like I got anything out of this movie. There was no story to it, it was just a bunch of random stuff thrown together into an hour and a half of film.
Thats all for now. Sorry I didn't have anything intelligent to say about it, but I really couldn't find an Inner Meaning to the movie.
Yeah, the parts when all the people were saying things but no sound was coming out were driving me crazy! It would show one person starting to say a sentence and then cut to a completely different person in another group finishing the sentence. Kind of annoying but I think it was just trying to show how artificial and cookie-cutter all these people were. Didn't matter who they were or where they were, it was all the same!
ReplyDeleteI like what you said about them being ghosts trapped in purgatory, just having to repeat themselves and not really knowing what's going on. I understand X, M, & A pretty well but I'm still not sure about the rest of the hotel people... ghosts could be right!
No worries Amanda. You're not alone in the confusion that is 'Last Year at Marienbad'. I'm also in that club. I also didn't heed the warning of not looking for plot, so I sat and struggled trying to find it. Maybe there is one, maybe there's not, who knows. But I think the movie allows its viewers to come up with their own endless theories about what it could possibly mean which is an interesting twist since most times you can do something similar, but there's also usually 'some' plot.
ReplyDeleteI could jump on board with the idea of ghosts being in a purgatory type of place. With the way all of the characters were acting, and the way the camera was floating around leads me towards the idea of death, rather than life that surrounds that joint.
It was all rather eerie to be quite honest. I would have felt quite awkward at that motel.
I love the whole "Hotel California" thing. And
ReplyDelete>>It was very dream like, very much like a guy trapped in his own mind without knowing it. He just cannot win in this movie. He can't win the girl, he can't win the game, and he doesn't know what he wants.
Yes, I think this is pretty much it exactly. Another way of thinking about it is, if you think about all movies as artifice, which they are, because it's actors and cameras and sets and not real life and stuff, this movie pushes artifice to its logical extreme, to the point where every single thing, aspect and person is so completely artificial as to be almost immobile.