Hiroshima Mon Amour

This 1959 film by Alain Resnais sets an intense tryst between a Japanese man and a French woman against the backdrop of the bombing of Hiroshima—or, rather, the memory of it. I had never heard of the film before it popped up as a suggestion on Netflix after I rented Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, so I went into it knowing nothing about it but the summarized plot on the envelope.

I’m glad I knew nothing of it before, because part of the power of the film, for me, was the style of the story’s unfolding. The unnamed protagonist, played by the incredibly stunning Emmanuelle Riva, reveals a piece of her past to her new and passionate lover, also nameless in the film, played by Eiji Okada, taking the film and the viewer in an unexpected direction. Her story of pain and loss mirrors her lover’s story, which he never truly tells, that of Hiroshima’s pain and loss, but which everyone already knows—or which everyone believes they know. The reason he does not tell Hiroshima’s story is that he was not there when his city was bombed. His family was, but he cannot know the trauma firsthand. However, he becomes the prompt for his lover’s narrative: he is the frame for the real story in the film, and he plays an integral role in the telling.

The film is beautifully shot, poetically spoken (entirely in French, but that’s not why it’s poetic), wonderfully scored, and, in my opinion, brilliantly acted. (Especially considering this is Riva's first film. Her performance does suffer at moments from the odd suddenly delivered line accompanied by a dive into her co-star’s arms, which seems to happen in every movie containing an actress right up until say … 1970, but it’s rare here and forgivable.) I had never heard of Emmanuelle Riva before this film, and she is quite a find. Her light moments in the first section of the film belie her darkness and intensity later. We know early on that there is more to this woman than meets the eye, but her initial attempts to keep her lover—and us—out of her head do not quite prepare us for the darkness of the memories she holds within. Throughout the film she is a surprise—to everyone, seemingly, except for the stranger with whom she has spent the night, who seems to already know her tale.

The central themes of the film are remembering and forgetting. Which is worse: the pain of remembering or the horror of forgetting? The film relies on metaphor and is built on the duality of absence and presence. A story told can never be a story lived; is a listener(reader)(viewer) less important than the storyteller? One cannot be without the other. Can one person represent the pain of a nation, a race, a gender? Can one person encompass an era—a time and place? Perhaps not for the whole world, but for one other person. But only if one’s story is listened to closely; as Riva says early in the film, one must learn to look at things closely. Can the telling of a story exorcise one from the power of the memories it contains? It is ironic (or perhaps not) that the woman’s hometown is the French town of Nevers. She can never forget her loss, despite her attempt to shut it away, and she will never remember all that she wishes she could remember, not in the way she knew her joy when it was happening. In a way, her struggle has always been a fight against the progression of time.

This is the kind of film where every shot means something, and every line means something. Aesthetically, it is gorgeous. Each frame’s composition is striking, and the starkness of the black-and-white fits the mood, the themes, and the bleak backdrop woven from war, destruction, and uneasiness about the future. The dialogue, which occurs only between these two characters throughout the whole film, is graceful and spare. Repetition is used effectively in writing, image, and music. And the story makes one think and think some more. The whole thing is constructed wonderfully.

Grade: A+. I loved it.

Interesting fact: Eiji Okada learned his lines phonetically for the movie. An incredible feat.