HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959)

A French actress from the town of Nevers is in Hiroshima in the last days of filming a movie that seems to be at least partly an anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons story. She meets a local Japanese architect and the two have a torrid affair despite both claiming to be happily married. Each is still dealing with past traumas: he lost his family in the bombing of Hiroshima; she took a German soldier as her lover during the war and was punished as a collaborator after the soldier was killed. Sex is had, as are philosophical post-coital conversations; he wants her to stay, and for a time it seems like she might, but in the end, they part at the Café Casablanca, her calling him Hiroshima and he calling her Nevers.

This is not a movie that a plot summary can do justice to. Not that I am all that enamored of Alain Resnais’s new wave film: I saw this many years ago and remembered little about when I sat down to watch it again, and I suspect not much of it will stay with me this time, either. The movie is known for its fragmented narrative and its often lovely and sensuous visual imagery. The first thing we see is entangled naked bodies with glittering ash falling on them, surely intended to refer to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; later, we see more graphic and upsetting footage of the bombing’s aftermath (though most of the very graphic things we see are actually from a fictional recreation of the bombing for a 1950s Japanese movie). The first ten minutes or so of the movie consists mostly of our naked lovers embracing and engaging in an odd conversation: she insists she has seen a number of sights in Hiroshima and he insists she could not have. We get footage of the town and the bombing museum; I took it that she did “sightsee” but that he insists that such behavior is not the same as having truly engaged with the horrors and tragedies of Hiroshima. We also get flashbacks of her affair and its aftermath--the villagers shave her head and she is exiled to her parents’ basement until she just leaves one day. The presentation of past and present events is not strictly chronological, though the ending of the movie is also the ending of their fling. The most interesting insight (to me) was her proclamation that, despite being married with children, she feels that by telling her story to the architect, she has betrayed her soldier lover. Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada do the best they can with their amorphous characters. Interesting as one of the earlier new wave films. [TCM]