At a social gathering at a château or baroque hotel, a man approaches a woman. He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced that she is waiting there for him. The woman insists they have never met. A second man, who may be the woman's husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man, including beating him several times at a mathematical game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships among the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers. The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as ‘A’, the first man is ‘X’, and the man who may be her husband is ‘M’.

Xu Feng, a Chinese film historian and critic, born in Shanghai February 8, 1971. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy as Film theory Master in 1998, he became a teacher in Film and TV Department of Central Academy of Drama. At the same time of his teaching, he is preparing his doctoral paper The New Wave and the Montage Theory in Paris 8 University.

Yang Beichen, received his Master's degree in Film Theory from Université Paris X, he is now pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Film History and Theory at Beijing Film Academy, and he is also the senior editor at Artforum China.