Rent Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Memory Film. - Hiroshima Mon Amour review by Steve

Alain Resnais’ debut feature is an innovative arthouse masterpiece which changed the language of cinema while also functioning as a memorial to the atrocity at Hiroshima in 1945. It’s a French/Japanese co-production shot by crews in both those countries which explores the ‘horror of forgetting’.

The picture is dominated by Emmanuelle Riva, playing what she is; a French actor in Hiroshima to make a film for the peace movement. She falls in love with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) and to an extent this is a poetic romance with incredibly lyrical dialogue by Marguerite Duras, suggestive of TS Eliot.

And this is sensual and intense with extraordinary photography. Resnais’ master stroke is to understand that the aftershock of the detonation of atomic bombs is too overwhelming to be confronted directly. So he sublimates the emotions it provokes into a subplot about the actor’s love for a German soldier in WWII.

The way it cuts between reality and memory is extremely evocative. The subliminal flashbacks are now ubiquitous. It is more art than entertainment, yet it is seductive. This is an allegory which challenges our empathy and intuition. It attempts to keep the memory of a monstrosity alive so it may never happen again.

You Saw Nothing - Hiroshima Mon Amour review by griggs

Nearly seventy years on, it still hits like a flashbulb. Resnais opens with bodies — ash-dusted, then flesh — and that famous rebuke: you saw nothing. It’s one of cinema’s great opening sequences, and Hiroshima Mon Amour earns every second.

Duras finds a way into Hiroshima through one woman’s private shame: a wartime affair, a German soldier, a shaved head, a cellar in Nevers. The horror is too huge to take in head-on, so the film comes at it sideways, through memory, guilt and desire. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.

At times, it disappears up its own ellipsis, but that’s almost the point. Memory doesn’t resolve; it circles. So does the film — elegant, maddening, and still burrowing after the credits roll.