The Great Movies by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Film
ISBN: 9780767910385
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2003-11-11T08:00:00+00:00

The men play a game. It has been proposed by M. It involves setting out several rows of matchsticks (or cards, or anything). Two players take turns removing matchsticks, as many as they want, but only from one row at a time. The player who is left with the last matchstick loses. M always wins. On the sound track, we hear theories: “The one who starts first wins . . . the one who goes second wins . . . you must take only one stick at a time . . . you must know when to . . .” The theories are not helpful because M always wins anyway. The characters analyzing the stick game are like viewers analyzing the movie: You can say anything you want about it, and it makes no difference.

“I’ll explain it all for you,” promised Gunther Marx, a professor of German at Illinois. We were sitting over coffee in the student union, late on that rainy night in Urbana. (He would die young; his son Frederick would be one of the makers of Hoop Dreams.) “It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Lévi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one, and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn’t, that they met before, that they didn’t, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn’t, that he killed her, that he didn’t. Any questions?”

I sipped my coffee and nodded thoughtfully. This was deep. I never subsequently read a single word by Lévi-Strauss, but you see I have not forgotten the name. I have no idea if Marx was right. The idea, I think, is that life is like this movie: No matter how many theories you apply to it, life presses on indifferently toward its own inscrutable ends. The fun is in asking questions. Answers are a form of defeat.

It is possible, I realize, to grow impatient with Last Year at Marienbad. To find it affected and insufferable. It doesn’t hurtle through its story like today’s hits—it’s not a narrative pinball machine. It is a deliberate, artificial artistic construction. I watched it with a pleasure so intense I was surprised. I knew to begin with there would be no solution. That the three characters would move forever through their dance of desire and denial, and that their clothing and the elegant architecture of the chateau was as real as the bedroom at the end of 2001—in other words, simply a setting in which human behavior could be observed.

There is one other way to regard the movie. Consider the narration. X tells A this, and then he tells her that. M behaves as X says he does—discovering them together, not discovering them, firing a pistol, not firing it. A remembers nothing, but acts as if she cares. She thinks she hasn’t met X before, and yet in some scenes they appear to be lovers.

Can it be that X is the artist—the author, the director?

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