A man tells a woman that they have met before—that they became lovers but then agreed to separate for a year. The year is now up, and he has come back for her. At first, she remembers nothing, but as he relates their past together, real or imaginary, snapshots of memory appear—and she begins to believe him. As more details begin to re-emerge from the woman's mind, the reader is shunted backwards and forwards between the past and the present, the actual and the illusory, that which is seen and that which is only glimpsed and guessed at.

The director Alain Resnais was already famous for films such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour when he asked Alain Robbe-Grillet—the author of several seminal novels, including Jealousy and The Voyeur, and the leader of the Nouveau Roman school—to write a script for him. The result was Last Year at Marienbad, a film that, as well as winning the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, has enthralled the critics, fascinated the public and become one of the greatest cult classics of modern cinema.