The film that started the craze for Chanel was a (neo)classic example of art imitating fashion: Chanel's designs are integral to both text and mise-en-scène, not that this mattered in the shops. Some critics interpreted Marienbad's baroque halls and labyrinthine gardens as a dreamscape, others as a landscape of the mind. Still, why not take it at face value? A man attempts to convince a woman that, a year ago, they met and fell in love at a European spa, perhaps Marienbad where they are now. The camera travels through time, past statues and statuesque beings-in-time, the characters. Among them is Delphine Seyrig, now in dropped-back black, now in brocade, now in white chiffon: the seamless integration of past and present (central to all Resnais's films) is reflected in Seyrig's changing dresses. Her shifts are reality shifts. But, as the author-screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet said, "The image is always in the present tense." (JB)