Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Directed by: Alain Resnais | 90 minutes | drama, war, romance | Actors: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernard Fresson

Hiroshima, the city where 200,000 people died within seconds when the atomic bomb fell on her. But also a city that fifteen years later, in 1959, has become a lively city, a city that never sleeps. Opposite this, Nevers, a typical French town: sleepy and idyllic, located on the unnavigable Loire river. No greater contrast seems possible.

For example, there are more contradictions in ‘Hiroshima mon amour’. Opposites that are perhaps more difficult to distinguish from each other than expected. It begins when the film shows images of two bodies entwined together, an example of intimacy, and when those images are then interspersed with images of the effects of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima: destruction, death, devastation, terrible injuries, deformed children. A direct indictment of what people can do to each other. And then go back to those two bodies, and the conversation those two people have.

Actually, that conversation is more of a monologue from her, the woman. In that monologue she talks about Hiroshima, about Nevers, about him and about herself. But above all, the conversation is about what one remembers, what one forgets, what one thinks one remembers and what one thinks one has to forget. A loving play of words between two strangers who nevertheless already know each other better than their own life partners. You also get that feeling as a viewer: we don’t get to know exactly how the two met, or even what their names are, but we do get a glimpse into their most intimate and deepest thoughts and feelings.

In ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ the major world issues and personal feelings and tragedies are linked together as a matter of course. Not only because of the poetic conversations between him and her, but also because of the often poetic images. And in those images too, opposites are exposed, which then don’t seem to be opposites (b) but merge into each other: memory and forgetfulness, war and peace, right and wrong, reason and madness, even life and death. When she talks about the German soldier, her first love, she quickly speaks in the second person to her Japanese lover, as if he were the reincarnation of that German soldier.

The poetic quality of ‘Hiroshima mon amour’, thanks mainly to the script by writer Marguerite Duras, takes the romantic story of an impossible love to a higher level. Director Resnais and Duras have a precise feel for each other, and let word and image constantly reinforce each other. Everything is shown in a calm manner, even if the melodrama predominates in the woman.

‘Hiroshima mon amour’, made more than 45 years ago, stands the test of time with great ease. Content and form, word and image, director, screenwriter and actors: everything transcends the French New Wave genre in which the film is rooted. As a result, the film is still a film that speaks: both when the emphasis is on the love story between these people, and when the emphasis shifts to the bigger picture.

What makes this film a masterpiece, however, is that those two extremes are in fact continuously fused into one whole with a great sense of poetry.

As a result, a ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ is a film that mysteriously appeals to the feeling and the mind.