Resnais's vision as a filmmaker still seems audacious even today. The Oscar-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras has a literary sensibility, and there are many lines of dialogue that have a resonance which goes beyond the simplicity of the words. French actress Emmanuelle Riva and Japanese actor Eiji Okada are perfect as the couple in the film, each having just the right presence for their respective roles.
In the movie, the story of an extramarital love affair unfolds against the backdrop of Hiroshima in 1958, when the city is still slowly recovering from the atomic blast that occurred there in World War II. On one level, this is a story of a transitory love among the ruins of a city once laid to waste, but it also speaks of something more personal—telling of a woman’s life so shattered that even her memory is dangerously fractured and can never be trusted completely. But although the story is framed by politics and war, to my mind the film is mainly a personal one about a woman whose past is so painful she is forced to blur the edges of raw memory that bleed into her present love affair.
The imagery in this film is often dazzling.
The central character in "Hiroshima mon amour" is a 34-year-old married Frenchwoman (Riva). She lives in Paris, but has come to Hiroshima to play a role in some sort of film being made by the international anti-nuke movement that flourished during the Cold War. “Hiroshima mon amour” takes place over roughly a 26-hour period, during which she has a romantic relationship with a French-speaking Japanese architect (Okada) whose wife is out of town.
The film opens around four in the morning in the woman's room at the Hotel New Hiroshima. She is in bed with the man after having picked him up at a café. She obsesses over the aftermath of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and speaks as if she saw things firsthand. He realizes, however, that she was not in Japan at that time.
It gradually emerges that being in Hiroshima and having sex with the Japanese man have somehow awakened in the woman memories of her life in France years earlier. Back when she was in her late teens, she experienced her first love as World War II wound down, but it was with a German soldier who was part of the force occupying France. Her young German lover was killed, and she was punished for having consorted with the enemy. Even though about 14 years have passed by the time she comes to Hiroshima, she is still struggling to come to terms with the personal tragedy that befell her when she was around 19 years old.
I feel that more than anything else "Hiroshima mon amour" is about the mutable nature of memory and of love. But a complementary idea explored in the movie is how people often have to partially forget the pain of their pasts to survive in the present.
"Hiroshima mon amour" isn’t an easy film to understand at first viewing, but I find that is one of the reasons it is so fascinating. A significant portion of the movie unfolds in disjointed flashbacks from the point of view of the troubled French actress.
