Psychologist Eva Fogelman agreed, disapproving of "the level of dress." Dr. Fogelman, a specialist in Holocaust survivors who wore a black sequined frock, pointed out that formerly this premiere social event for New York's cinephiles was a black-tie affair. The dress code on this year's invitation was specified as "dazzling," a category that apparently embraced cocktail dresses, jeans, and one neon-green suit.

"Many people didn't enjoy" the more formal dress code, said festival program director Richard Peña. "But also, we never stopped anyone who wasn't wearing black tie."

He added that "Tavern had become almost too big. We wanted to rein in the party a little. Look, there were some economic considerations too--we had to lay off some staff this year, and we thought a smaller, low-key party would fit the spirit of the year."

The hall's vertiginous geometry also seemed to fit the spirit of the opening-night film selection, Alain Resnais's Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass), a surreal late-career fantasia about a man who becomes obsessed with the woman whose wallet he finds in a parking garage. The director punctuates their halting, mutually suspicious affair with lingering shots of wind-ruffled grass.

The 87-year-old Mr. Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad) came onstage before the screening with the help of a cane, which he said was only temporary. "My leg isn't broken," he told the audience. "But considering the way you use the expression 'I hope you break your leg,' I think it's a good sign for the film."

Mr. Resnais received a standing ovation, but his new movie rendered some viewers speechless. Young director Alex Olch (The Windmill Movie), when asked what he thought of the film, responded with a slow, uncertain nod and a long draft of pomegranate martini. The Film Comment staffer standing next to him followed suit.

"There was a lot of the nouvelle vague in the film," said WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate. The movie's false ending, intrusive narrator, ironic score--they were tricks that "only a young filmmaker who's trying to show off or an older filmmaker who knows everything would use," he added.

One of the film's stars, Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), stood nearby with the flame-haired burlesque dancer Dirty Martini, drinking a beer. What did Mr. Amalric think of the movie's chilling dentist's office scene? "I just spent the past month at the dentist," he said, shaking his head. "You get older and it all falls out."

The setting of the film is a small French provincial town during and after the German Occupation. Henri Decae provided the ritualized cinematography in a series of short uninflected vignettes centered on a spiritual duel between a nonbeliever and a true believer. It further establishes Melville as the last to be discovered and appreciated giant of the French New Wave of the ’50s and ’60s.

As it happens, I was doing my year in Paris in 1961 when Last Year at Marienbad opened at a Right Bank art theater on a direct line from my Left Bank hotel, the Hotel de Seine, across the Pont Neuf to my ultimate destination, the American Express lobby, where American cinéastes like me found a lifeline from home in the form of a timely money order, to make possible our seemingly aimless meandering in the streets of the world’s movie capital. Resnais was not then too high on my list of auteurs. I was too busy savoring the glories of Max Ophüls’ Lola montès; Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme; the endless revivals of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford and Josef von Sternberg; Claude Chabrol’s Les bonnes femmes; and François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste. I was too deeply into the cinema of narrative to be overwhelmed by an avant-garde exercise in virtually dispensing with narrative altogether. It provided a conversation piece for students and cinéastes, and I saw people in cafes playing the film’s famous or infamous match game, which I finally figured out, but when I tried to get my solution published in a film magazine, by then nobody was interested, which is very much the story of my life in those years. I shall have to take another look at the film to see if it has stood the test of time.

Time and memory. These are the great themes of Resnais, and the two implacable antagonists of human existence. His Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955), is still the most emotionally powerful film on the Holocaust, and the question asked at its conclusion is how long will we remember the horrible spectacles supposedly inscribed in our consciences for all the days of our lives. We are getting answers to that question all around the world.

No such profundity and gravity is present in the comparatively playful Last Year at Marienbad. Its action, or rather, lack of action, takes place in a baroque universe where the human beings cast shadows, but the trees and shrubs do not. The nameless woman, played by Delphine Seyrig, is pursued by a man, played by Giorgio Albertazzi, who repeatedly insists that they met the year before in Marienbad. Seyrig’s live-in companion or possibly her husband, played by Sacha Pitoëff, remains impassive and unconcerned through all of Seyrig’s questions of what they were doing last year, and where. The situation would be somewhat comic, if the images were not so relentlessly stylized and insistently haut bourgeois.

I recall the Coco Chanel gowns that Seyrig wore throughout the proceedings, and I recall also becoming fixated on her gleamingly stockinged knees, which, I supposed makes Marienbad more sensuous than sensual. Several years later, while attending the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czechoslovakia as a member of the New York Film Festival Selection Committee, I was driven by the late Richard Roud to the real Marienbad, now Marienske Lazne, and it was not baroque at all, but Greek Classical. Then again, Karlovy Very itself was once the legendary Carlsbad in the glory days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The point that I am very slowly making is that time changes everything, and it often plays tricks with our memories.

To conclude: Sacha Vierny’s exquisite black-and-white cinematography would be unimaginable in color. Its very starkness depends upon a world in which there are only two chromatic possibilities and the mediating shadows linking them together. The eerie organ music accompanying the images was composed by Seyrig’s brother, Francis. Last Year at Marienbad is from another time in the evolution of the cinema. Its seductive interiors were reportedly shot mostly in Nymphenburg Castle in Bavaria, but this does not make it a fairy tale. Seyrig’s palpable mental anguish is very real and contemporary.

While the others in that list are recognized classics, Two for the Road (out this week from Fox Home Entertainment) has generally been regarded as a lightweight charmer. On the surface, it is the stuff of traditional drama: The 10-year marriage of Mark (Albert Finney) and Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) Wallace is recalled, in flashbacks of the couple’s past trips through the French countryside. Mark is an architect, and his chief patron has summoned him to finalize a house; this miserable present-day work trip (Joanna has accompanied him) serves as the film’s through-line conflict. Is their marriage over? This voyage also acts as a springboard for associative digressions into memories of their first meeting, of their lean newlywed years, of their nightmarish double-date vacation with another couple. The Time article, while praising the “juggling of chronology,” dismissed it as “otherwise an ordinary Audrey Hepburn vehicle.”

Two for the Road is absolutely defined by its chronological structure, in which the vignettes of a lifetime alternate at an increasingly rapid rate, each memory informing all subsequent ones. A characteristic sequence: The just-met couple looks through a café window and sees a husband and wife arguing. Unable to hear the argument, they amuse themselves by guessing the source of conflict. We hear Mark’s voice, then Joanna’s voice, synched to the older couple’s gesticulating, as though they’re putting words in their mouths. And then we realize that they’re no longer pretending—the camera returns to Mark and Joanna, years later, having their own fight. As they walk out of view, a red sports car passes and then roars into the next scene—this time driven by Mark, on his way to a tryst years later. A love letter to Joanna is read over the scene of the tryst, and as he begins his solo trip home, the letter concludes, and Joanna and their young daughter Caroline are suddenly in the car. Joanna offers Mark some of Caroline’s ice cream; he refuses. Then the couple is walking together, Joanna feeding Mark an ice-cream cone, on their first trip. It’s a heartbreaking fugue in which experience corrupts innocence in all of three minutes.

Of course, this wasn’t the first film to investigate the way memory haunts lovers. The works of Alain Resnais ( Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad) are perhaps the most famously anamnestic in cinema, but Two for the Road had a close precedent, Claude Lelouch’s 1966 A Man and a Woman, in which a couple’s budding romance is interlaced with each lover’s recollections of their late spouses.

A Man and a Woman made $6 million in the U.S., won two Oscars, and paved the way for Two for the Road (it may not be a coincidence that veteran French editor Madeleine Gug was brought on board to cut the film). Screenwriter Frederic Raphael approached Donen after John Schlesinger had deemed the idea “too difficult”; it’s hard to imagine another filmmaker making the material as accessible as Donen does. He tempers the caustic script with beautiful photography and a charmingly melancholy Henry Mancini score. Even as he plays with jump cuts and mid-zoom freeze frames, Donen does his part to normalize the experience. Whereas Resnais’ jumbles disorient the viewer, Two for the Road carefully coaxes us into its rhythms—slowly at first, eventually mixing time frames for only seconds at a time.

As a map, we’re given Audrey Hepburn’s varying hairstyles and costumes, and year-specific automobiles. Those cars are temporal clues, but in a movie that never shows the characters’ homes, they’re also the sets—and part of a trend that escaped Time’s notice. In the same year that Jean-Luc Godard’s camera spent 10 minutes tracking toward the gruesome source of a French traffic jam in Weekend, several Hollywood films revealed the centrality of the automobile within modern life, as each cinematic set-piece seemed to come assigned with its own memorable make and model: Dustin Hoffman escorting Mrs. Robinson home in an Alfa Romeo Duetto ( The Graduate); Lee Marvin’s ecstatically destructive test drive of a Chrysler Imperial ( Point Blank); and Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s elongated demise in a Ford 730 V8 Deluxe Sedan ( Bonnie and Clyde).

Upping the ante, Two for the Road makes the cars subtle thematic signposts. Mark and Joanna start out with the spontaneity of a green MG TD, are held prisoner by another couple’s staid Ford station wagon, and cruise luxuriantly but solemnly in a white Mercedes 230. (The red sports car that Mark drives to his extramarital conquest is, of course, a Triumph.)

In the end, a vehicle is just a vehicle—except when it’s an Audrey Hepburn vehicle. She swears, bares skin and generally loosens up more than we’re used to, and if there remains what Henry Mancini called “Audrey’s quality of wistfulness—a kind of slight sadness,” her persevering Joanna ameliorates the sullenness of Mr. Finney’s Mark. The warmth between Hepburn and Mr. Finney keeps the bantering couple from becoming a mere symbol of crabby matrimony.

Their repartee is in the DNA of both their arguments and their romance, from flirtatiously antagonistic courtship to tin-anniversary cruelty, blurring that thin line between love and hate. After repeated viewings, the audience shares with them a persistence of memory that bleeds between and informs abutting time frames; as with memory, there is no longer a neat lineage of events. If the older couple keeps intruding on the younger couple—in passing cars, at the café window—it’s the romance of the younger that sustains the older. The film is not, as it seems at first, a post-mortem determining of how things went wrong, but simply a flood of memories every bit as confusing as true, exhausted love.