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Hiroshima Mon Amour

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Hiroshima mon amour is a unique film. This is the grafting of cinema technique with literature. In a unique collaboration between director Alain Resnais and novelist Margaurite Duras one of the truly landmark films of the 20th Century was born.

This is a story about beginnings and endings about rebirth following tragedy. Moreover this is a story about memory. Fifteen years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a film crew arrives to make a film about peace. The actress in this film meets and has an intense affair with a Japanese man she meets in a bar on the night before she is to return to France.

In a startling series of flashbacks we learn of her love for a German soldier that left her ostracized in her native Nevers, France. The story, which all takes place in a twenty four hour period is striking because of its emotional impact. The atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima and the WWII romance destroyed the womans life. Now is the time to grow and to be reborn. Rebirth takes place through a confrontation with our memories of the past. A facing of the things that made us what we are. This is the sense the viewer takes from this film.

The Criterion DVD has an excellent transfer of the print which is presented in its original monural sound. The extras on the disc deserve a look. There is an excellent commentary by film historian Peter Cowie that helps to explain the marriage of film and literature between Resnais and Duras while offering some anecdotal technical information. Also included are vintage interviews with Alain Resnais and star Emmanuelle Reve. A 2003 interview with Reve is a highlight of the disc and should not be missed. The annotated selections of the script are also worth a brief look.

Anyone interested in the history of film should do themselves a favor and view this important film classic.

As with most works of art that probe a subtle truth, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" will confuse a lot of people. On the surface, this film appears to be strange glimpse of failed romance and anti-social behavior. The characters, an unidentified French woman and Japanese man are having a brief and transitory love affair in Hiroshima, many years after World War II. Both of them are married (the man professes to love his wife) and neither is a stranger to anonymous love affairs.

Although neither party knows the other's name, they share crucial aspects of their history and identity with each other. The man is a resident of Hiroshima who was away serving in the army when the city was bombed. During the war, the woman lived in an occupied French city called Nevers and fell in love with a German soldier. When the soldier was killed the woman was punished for being a collaborator and was subsequently banished to her parents' basement for several month where in her own words she became "mad with spite".

The film opens by interweaving scenes of the man and woman making love, with scenes of Hiroshima bombing victims. This tells us that their story-particularly their love affair-is rooted in an act of unimaginable destruction. In the man's case, everything returns to the bombing of Hiroshima. When the woman tells him of the different monuments and documentary footage of the bombing she encountered, he replies that she has seen nothing. In the woman's case, her entire life was redefined the moment her German lover was killed by French partisans. The act of destruction was personally more traumatic and pivotal than the war itself. Worse yet was her tremendous sense of failure in surviving this event and being able to continue life without her lover. The man is inescapably a product of the bombing of Hiroshima just as the woman is a product of her experience in Nevers.

The woman tells the man that until her affair with him, she has never loved anyone the way she loved the German soldier. She shares her sense of failure at having survived the death of the German solider with the man.

The beginning of courtship and love often involves putting one's best foot forward, so to speak-of promoting oneself in order to appeal to the other person. But this film argues that the foundation of love is something more sacred and more sensible. It is often a person's deepest sense of failure, fear, or inadequacy that defines who that person really is. The woman attests to this by stating that her true sense of self began when she emerged from her eight months of confinement in her parents' basement. She tells the man that aside from him, no one including her husband understands that that experience made her who she is today. The Japanese man expresses great joy in being the only one in the world who knows. He comprehends the magnitude of her gift and its testament of her love for him.

The love affair between the man and the woman is a doomed and paradoxical one. The woman gives herself to the man completely, but she can only do so because their relationship is free of any obligation to each other. They meet only for the purpose of loving each other under anonymous and temporary conditions. For them no other role is possible. At the end of the film, the loves part without revealing their names. The woman tells the man his name is "Hiroshima" and he replies, "Yes, and yours is Nevers. Nevers in France." In refusing to disclose their names, the lovers banish their public identities from the momentary world that they have created for themselves. A love affair is essentially the creation of a new world that is populated only by two people under specific conditions. Entirely new things become important. Streets, restaurants, and hotel rooms that would normally mean nothing suddenly take on an incalculable significance. In this case, Hiroshima is the place where their love affair takes place, which implies that the city is destroyed twice: first by the bombing and then by the end of the affair. Of course the film begins with the scenes of the lovers intertwined with scenes of the bombing. In the years to come, whenever the woman hears of Hiroshima she will immediately think of both. Like the love that defined who she was as a human being, this one too is rooted in unimaginable destruction.

While the film is superb in its own right, one should really read the original screen play by Marguerite Duras since it sheds much light on the characters in the film. The screen play describes the Japanese man as having Western features and hardly looking like a typical Asian male. Duras purposely requested this so that viewers would not see the Japanese man as exotic or unusual. The Japanese is further described as being worldly in the sense that he is conversant in several languages and involved in politics. Duras states that he is the kind of man who would be at home in any country. Similarly the woman is described as being not very beautiful. In the film the man tells her that he was first interested in her because she looked bored. The attraction defies typical filmic clichés but makes sense is subtle ways.

While this film may alienate many viewers, it will hopefully leave most with a deeper impression and with a series of questions. What does it really mean to love someone? What is the real definition of fidelity? What else does war destroy besides physical things such as people, materials, and the environment? What is trust? What defines a person's identity, success or failure?

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the screenplay for the classic French film directed by Alain Resnais. This is one of the few screenplays I truly enjoy, as Hiroshima is a wonderful story about remembering and forgetting set in the context of post-nuclear war and love.

True to the classic stream-of-consciousness style of Duras, this screenplay is a highly emotional account of a French woman's journey to Hiroshima to film an anti-war movie and the affair with a Japanese man that ensues. Throughout the course of the affair, the woman is struck with the memory of her German lover during WWII and the insanity that his death brought on.

In many ways, this is Duras at her finest. She has an uncanny ability to take specific stories and bring them to a level of universality as far as human emotion and circumstance are concerned. This is a powerful and riveting tale that is not to be missed.

Hiroshima, Mon amour is a film that explores the idea of memory: what is to forget, and what is to remember? What is experience and what is reconstruction? Do we have total control over these notions, and do we need to have control over them? With the Hiroshima bombing tragedy as the layout of the film, Resnais and Duras mock the European (and maybe the Japanese themselves through the museum and other memorial things that they built) understanding of what had really happen there. Universally, the story then focus on the conflict of understanding that the Riva character is suffering in when she gets herself involved with the Okada character, thus revealing her past to him as they both struggle into creating their definition of what love is. Is it enough to compare one's suffering to others' when their sufferings are more 'horrific' in nature? Not only that this film tries to answer this question but it also brings out lots of other questions on our common humanity. A complex and very intellectual film, but one should be warned (or should be aware of its implication from Resnais and Duras) of the passive nature of time from the Riva character's subjectivity too when watching the film.

One of the prime examples of the French New Wave, a style of cinema that focused more on a personalized visual and experimental styles, with increased depths of feelings and exploration of themes, was Alain Resnais's debut effort, Hiroshima Mon Amour, which explored the effects of the atomic bomb and underscored the need to remember traumatic but profound memories for fear of them being repeated.

There is a symbolic part in the movie of an arm enfolded over a body, all encrusted in frost. Soon, the frost turns to beads of water, which in turn is the sweat of two bodies together. Old passions reawoken, an intimate meeting of two cultures, and that depicts the love story between a French actress playing a nurse in a film on peace and a Japanese architect. Both, it turns out, are happily married, yet there's something wanting in the woman, and it all goes back to her traumatic past during the war, in her hometown of Nevers in Central France, Southeastish from Orleans, and situated on the Loire River. After a night in bed, the couple spend the remainder of the next day together. For the man, it's a desperate attempt to hold onto her, as she has to leave tomorrow for Paris. For the woman, it's an internal turmoil involving her past and her growing attraction to the man, to whom she confides in.

But it's interesting to see the POV's of both. For the architect, Hiroshima became a part of history indelibly imbedded in the Japanese psyche. For the actress, Hiroshima meant "the end of war, the real end...[I was] stunned that they had dared, stunned that they succeeded, then the beginning of a new fear, followed by indifference, and also the fear of indifference." That is a source of bitterness to every Japanese, that the whole world rejoiced at the end of the war, including the actress.

The initial half of the film is shot documentary style over the woman's narration, witnessing the legacy of Hiroshima fourteen years after the fact. For her, seeing the newsreel footage, the memorial sites built at detonation point, and the movies made of the victims, is being there. It is the footage from the films that is pretty grim, be it burns on people, peeling skin, closeups on deformed and scorched hands, many on children and infants, and bald patches on hair. "I felt the heat on Peace Square in Hiroshima. 10,000 degrees in Peace Square" she says, to which the architect's voice intones "No, you saw nothing in Hiroshima." He is more connected by the reality because he is Japanese, so how can she know, witness, or feel the concept of Hiroshima? She feels tied more by empathy, with the film she's making and her own experiences during the war.

The testament to war and victimization is by her narration on why people are angry when they are deprived of their dignity and the necessities to survive: "It is the principle of inequality advanced by certain peoples against other people. By certain races against other races, by certain classes against other classes."

Resnais tweaks the conventional linear narrative flow with one combining past, present, and future into one and using flashbacks reconciling time with memory. And some fluid camera shots panning down the Hiroshima concourses and streets are well executed. The actress's romantic past and newfound encounter mesh with her taking in the city: "Just as in love, there is the illusion that it can never be forgotten. So with Hiroshima, I had the illusion that I would never forget...just as in love." But can she forget the architect when she returns to her husband and children in France?

Both leads, Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, carry this movie. Lyrical, moody, thoughtful, and with brilliant cinematography utilizing the darkness of the cafes and nighttime streets, and the whiteness of the actress's dress. Riva herself exhibits a forlorn, credulous, frail, and ultimately vulnerable woman in the actress, while Okada's architect is stolid, sardonic, but also at breaking point when it looks as if he's going to lose her.

Despite the long-trod thought of "never again," the actress's thoughts paints a bleak future of mankind unless it gives up its warlike savage ways: "It will happen again. 200,000 dead. 80,000 wounded in 9 seconds. ...10,000 degrees on Earth, 10,000 suns on Earth. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will reign. A whole city will be lifted off the ground, then drift down in ashes."

Alain Resnais does not neglect the blast of Hiroshima by wrapping it with a simple love-affair...

His film is puzzling, but, at the same time, a compromise, a promise, a pledge to human society... It is too daring by its conventional moral standards, distinguished in the way it was done, written, made and executed...

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is about the fortitude of man, with its mental and physical power... Alain Resnais and his writer-collaborator Marguerite Duras combined a love story with an anti-bomb story... They carry out the horror of Hiroshima and the sorrow of a lost first love...

Hiroshima is a tragedy that shocks us, while the story of love in Nevers makes us cry...

The story of Nevers does not trivialize the story of Hiroshima... We gasp at the tragedy of Hiroshima as we weep over the tragedy at Nevers... We contemplate a cosmic and a personal problem at the same time.

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is a new kind of film... It has great technical ability, illustrating hypothesis plus fact...

There is a close-up of Emmanuelle Riva , who has just glanced at Eiji Okada, asleep... Suddenly there is a brief flash-cut of the body of a wounded young man lying in approximately the same position in another place...

Resnais' camera moves like a stream from the present to the past and back to the present... It cuts back to Riva's face, and then back to Okada asleep, and in that split second the technique of the subliminal flash cut, used to describe a character's state of mind, is born...

This cut is the key to the film, for it is the man whom she calls 'Hiroshima' who reminds her of her lover at Nevers...

It is the tragedy of his race that reminds her of the small tragedy of her life...

This identification is carried through in the most neurotic moments of her recitative, when she looks at the Japanese and speaks to him as if he were her German lover of fourteen years before...

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" reflects image and sound, past and present; the actual and the remembered; Hiroshima (a city of neon) and Nevers (a city of gray stone); the personal and the cosmic; a man and a woman; concern for the individual and concern for mankind...

This painful and deeply moving film retains its power with the passage of time. It's the story of a French woman and a Japanese man who become lovers in Hiroshima prior to the dropping of the bomb. The movie was an experiment in juggling past, present, and future at the time of its release - and it puzzled audiences then. Viewers are more sophisticated now, and I don't believe any audience today would be confused by the leaps Director Resnais takes with this film. One of the original movies that heralded the French New Wave, Hiroshima Mon Amour continues to enthrall with its tragic and soulful love story set amid a cataclysm.

Director Alain Resnais' extremely matter-of-fact portrait of an adulterous, interracial relationship was considered frank to the point of shocking in 1959; today few will be even mildly startled. But while time has dimmed this aspect of the film, it has not dimmed the complex and very poetic nature of the film as a whole, and HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR remains one of the finest examples of French "New Wave" cinema. The story itself is simple. An actress (Emmanuelle Riva) has come to Hiroshima to appear in an international film promoting peace. Two days before she is scheduled to return to France, she casually picks up a Japanse architect (Eiji Okada.) Instead of the casual sexual encouter they expect, the two find a profound physical and emotional passion. The depth of this passion leads Riva to make revelations about a tragic wartime romance to Okada--a revelation that leaves her emotionally fractured and vulnerable to Okada's demands that she remain in Hiroshima with him. The two are then faced with the choice of destroying their marriages by continuing the relationship or parting never to see each other again, with neither choice really desirable.

A description of the storyline does not in any way describe what director Resnais does with it. The two leads are exceptional in their handling of the equally exceptional script, which presents us with a series of visual and verbal motifs (hair, hands, heads) that gradually acquire a poetic quality. The cinematography and editing manage to merge a documentary tone with a poetic lyricism. And much of the film's complexity lies in the way it treats the city of Hiroshima, which was destroyed by the atomic bomb and yet rebuilt itself; the city becomes a metaphor for the couple's relationship, the tragedies of passing time, the transient nature of memory, and everything that is both best and worst in human passion. Ultimately, HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR does not present us with any easy answers, either about the couple its story presents or the nature of human passion in all its guises; it also requires full concentration, a certain degree of patience, and the ability to grasp metaphorical content. Because of this, I do not really recommend the film to a purely casual viewer--but those actively seeking a complex cinematic experience will find it makes a powerful, multi-layered statement, and for them I recommend it very highly indeed.

There is no getting around the fact that film auteur Alain Resnais' 1959 masterwork can be challenging to sit through, but there are certainly moments of emotional potency in this deep-dive examination of a passionate love affair whose fate is governed by inescapable memories. Written by acclaimed French novelist Margeurite Duras, the seemingly threadbare story covers the 24-hour arc of the relationship between a French actress, making an anti-nuclear movie in Hiroshima, and a Japanese architect. Both are married, but that inconvenience seems incidental to the plot since the actress is more pervasively haunted by a doomed WWII romance with a German soldier during the Nazi occupation. Her intense feelings toward the architect have an intractable bond to her past.

In a groundbreaking narrative technique that can be seen in movies as recent as this year's Babel, Resnais freely manipulates time and jumps between past and present in order to induce a cathartic response from the actress character. The film's opening is legendary as we see erotic images of intertwined naked torsos first covered in what looks like nuclear ash, then with radioactive sparkles and finally in post-coital sweat. However, the next sequence is even more daring, relentlessly showing the devastation of the 1945 A-bomb in Hiroshima through artifacts in the Peace Museum (which are still there) and painful footage from a 1952 Japanese feature film, "Children of Hiroshima", which shows the human toll in graphic detail. All the while, the actress expresses her empathy for the events, while the architect counters that she could not comprehend the scope of the impact. This disparity is what provides the impetus to the plot toward the inevitable conclusion.

In her feature film debut, Emmanuelle Riva powerfully provides the film's emotional center as the actress, while the superb Eiji Okada makes the architect's obsession with her palpable. As with most of Resnais' films, the cinematography is masterful with deliberately composed shots that linger in the memory - Michio Takahashi did the Hiroshima sequences, while Sacha Vierny handles the flashbacks around Nevers, France. The 2003 Criterion Collection DVD gratefully contains their standard pristine print transfer, as well as several notable extras - an informative if rather academic commentary track from film historian Peter Cowie; two vintage interviews with Resnais, one from 1961 and the other an audio-only talk done in 1980; a staged interview with Riva at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and a recent one conducted in 2003 specifically for the DVD; and excerpts of Duras' script annotations spoken over selected film scenes.

Its about time someone released this historically important film on a digital format. The quality is as clean as you can get, it has several interviews, plus you get a thick booklet containing a roundtable discussion between all the New Wave directors, character synopsis, and so on. Criterion have really outdone themselves with this wonderful gem!