Alain Resnais’s 1961 film “Last Year at Marienbad” is perhaps the ultimate evocation of the line, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” The film became an art-house brain-teaser back when glittering doses of la dolce vita and Old-World ennui were cinematic exotica for American moviegoers. The collaboration between Mr. Resnais (“Hiroshima, Mon Amour”) and nouvelle romain bad boy Alain Robbe-Grillet (“The Erasers”) boasted a “what-the-huh?” narrative in which a would-be pickup artist called X (the suave and indefatigable Giorgio Albertazzi) circles endlessly around the glamorous-yet-detached A (Delphine Seyrig, epitomizing high style in her sleek Coco Chanel outfits) amid the vast, unending corridors and opulent appointments of a European resort hotel.

As creepy, disorienting organ music groans and shimmers in the background, the bow-tied swain and his gorgeously blank object of desire appear and reappear like pawns as a lugubrious voice-over supplies the looping play-by-play: They met last year, or did they? She promised to run off with him if he came back, or did she? That other guy (Sacha Pitoeff, with his imperious cheekbones, who keeps beating everyone at his arcane game of pickup sticks) is her husband, or he isn’t — and did he shoot her? If it’s all a fantasy, then whose fantasy is it?

Resurrected by Rialto Pictures in a new 35 mm print for a two-week run beginning Friday at Film Forum, “Last Year at Marienbad” is still a kick to watch. It’s a formal masterpiece, undiminished by the ease with which Mr. Robbe-Grillet’s repetitive, furnishings-obsessed (“these carpets, these thick carpets”) monologue inspires parody, or by the sometimes overbearing weight of significance assigned to certain 1960s sensations that buckle under the stress. Like one of the tuxedoed dandies posing like statuary in one of the film’s many elegant tableaux vivants, it re-animates well.

That’s partly because we’ve had decades to absorb its influence. Not for nothing did the British director Peter Greenaway hire Mr. Resnais’s cinematographer, Sacha Vierny, to shoot most of his coolly diabolical puzzle pictures, beginning with 1985’s “A Zed and Two Noughts.” Mr. Greenaway often has cited “Marienbad” as his favorite film, and even his close attention to topiary design bears its stamp: The great iconic image in “Marienbad” is that of the gardens at the 17th-century Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, in which stationary characters pose in a wide, overhead shot amid the perfectly manicured triangular bushes. The people cast shadows (apparently painted into the ground by Mr. Resnais’s crew), but the shrubs do not. Another of the film’s delicious conceits is that while the flesh-and-blood actors spend much of the film in the posture of mannequins, signifying nothing, a statue in the gardens of a man and a woman generates a variety of allegorical interpretations — a sculpture that is more alive than the people who contemplate it.

Mr. Resnais’s ceaselessly gliding camera became a pervasive influence as well. Tracking shots move down long, glimmering corridors in a ghostly hotel full of guests who do not seem entirely of this world, re-enacting events, perhaps murderous, of another time. Sounds like “The Shining.” Pay close attention to those shots, whose flow is constantly interrupted by edits that jump ahead to the next setting even as the “scene” between the man and the woman continues. The film never pauses to sort out any fixed relationship to chronology. Even when costume changes or abrupt shifts in location might signal movement forward or backward, the single, ongoing voice of the narrator and the cloud-like float of the camera insist that everything is happening all at once.

The film’s purgatorial chic remains audacious now because no one really makes movies like this anymore. Its mystery is forever intact, although some might intuit a clue from reports that Mr. Robbe-Grillet was probably influenced by a 1940 science-fiction novel called “Morel’s Invention.” Written by the Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares, the book concerns a desert island filled by life-like projections of a 20-year-old memory machine, and a real-time castaway who finds himself among them. If that supplied a kernel for the concept of “Marienbad,” the movie takes the idea into far more dazzling and elaborate terrain. There’s nothing else like it.

“Last Year in Marienbad” begins Friday and runs through January 31 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).