He is 'a phantom, waiting for her to come'. He doesn't exist. He prowls the corridors for ever...
He has died - falling from the broken balustrade.
She has been killed by her husband.
The drawer of identical photos - then rearranged in game layout.
Marienbad doesn't exist. And I don't mean that as some kind of clever pronouncement on the film. No, it really doesn't exist, which is why I could never find my car that I parked there again.*
P.S. 5 April 2022. I learned today with interest that Resnais was Agnes Varda's editor, and that they were both influenced by William Faulkner's 'Wild Palms' (two stories, cross-cut). (Mark Cousins 'The Story of Film'.)
* I think it does - Nabokov wrote one of his short stories there. It was a very popular German spa town, but after World War 2 the German population were expelled. The Czech name is Mariánské Lázně. All this does of course add to the confusion. I guess the Germans carried on calling it Marienbad, and the French perhaps did likewise.
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