Perhaps the ultimate "family plot," Resnais's first English-language film, written by playwright David Mercer, plays off the fantasies of a dying novelist (John Gielgud) as he passes away a galling night of rectal pain by reinventing his own family: his son (Dirk Bogarde), a priggish lawyer with his father's knack for the self-satisfied one-liner; son's mistress (Elaine Stritch) or father's dead wife, or both; daughter-in-law (Ellen Burstyn), who distracts herself from her cold-blooded husband with a hot-blooded physicist who might also be Gielgud's illegitimate son... All this takes place on shifting sets that make no pretense to reality-unless the seashore on a painted backdrop is reality. Which question brings us to the moment where all is revealed, or not, on the sweeping lawn of a chateau in the depths of the country, and one is reminded that Marienbad, too, was a far-off, elegant land where, as the writer says, "Nothing is written."