Last Year at Marienbad
 — 10 Films With Lousy First Dates

Participants: Man (X, played by Giorgio Albertazzi) and Woman (A, played by Delphine Seyrig)

Circumstances: Not exactly a date in the traditional sense, but somehow X and A are alone together for a very extended period of time as X tries to convince A, a married woman, that they had a riotous affair the previous summer and that she should run off with him now. Their entire (mostly VO) conversation runs against a mesmerizing exploration of every nook and cranny of the deserted hotel estate they supposedly had their affair in. For spice, A's husband -- we assume -- keeps barging into the conversation and trying to assert his authority over X.

What Makes It Awful? X won't quit! Throughout the entire film he keeps trying to convince her they were together by telling her all the things they did and what happened when they did them. A tells him over and over again she doesn't know what he's talking about, but X doesn't seem to care.

Outcome: A perfectly good question and one that film critics and academics have fiercely debated in the five decades since it was released. Is X simply trying to seduce A by making all this up? Is X from another dimension where all this actually happened? Is the hotel an insane asylum? Alain Resnais' ambiguous masterpiece won't say, at least directly, so your guess is as good as ours.