Movie Review – Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
Written by Marguerite Duras
Directed by Alain Resnais

Some historical events seem to be glossed over. We’re taught they happened, but then the textbook quickly moves on to other topics. One of these is the atomic bombing of Japan. I personally believe this sits beside the Holocaust as the two most monstrous acts ever performed by humans on each other. Because I came along decades after the act, I was fed the very manicured propaganda around it. Even worse, I was homeschooled and given Bob Jones University’s take. I think most of us couldn’t really articulate what happened directly following the dropping of those bombs or what the mood in Japan was in the following weeks or months. But such a thing could not happen without the people’s lives being devastated beyond anything we Americans have experienced.

A man (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect, and a woman (Emmanuelle Riva), a French actress, lay in bed together. She speaks, in voiceover, about all the aftermath of the bombing she’s seen since arriving in Hiroshima to shoot an anti-war film. The actress tries to impress upon the man how much this has affected her. He patiently rebuffs her, saying she could not understand the loss, as his entire family was killed in the bombing while he was off fighting for Japan. She’s just here to make a movie, a facsimile of reality. It’s not delivered aggressively, simply matter-of-factly. 

They keep talking, and she eventually recalls her first lover, a German soldier whom she saw die. She’s from the town of Nevers, a name which fascinates the architect. They clearly just met the night before; this is a fling. Bits and pieces of their lives outside of this tryst come to light. She has children. They are both married. She’s flying home the next day, but he is enthusiastic about spending time with her. The woman eventually tells about her soldier, how she stayed with him over the two days it took him to die, and how her community, upon finding out she had been consorting with the enemy, shaved her head and locked her in the cellar for days. She’s never told her husband this story.

These people are trapped in the never-ending nightmare of the war. It may have ended almost fifteen years ago, but they can’t escape it. The film is suffused with a dreamlike atmosphere, and as a result, memories and the present bleed into each other. Quick flashes of the past act as bursts in our minds, the claws of what happened pulling us back to the senses of being in that place. We see it in the fragments of the actress’s time with the soldier. What is even more harrowing are the images in the mind’s eye of the architect as he pictures the horrors he was told about when he arrived home. The banks of a river flooded with Japanese people in various states of scorched, trying to soothe the atomic fire that was searing through their nervous system. 

After its release, filmmaker Erich Rohmer spoke about Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and said it was about “the anguish of the future.” Our characters are unmoored in time. They live physically in the present, but the trauma of what they have seen anchors them in the past. They will age, become old, and die but never escape those moments from the war. Their minds are imprisoned. 

The film feels modern, like few films of the late 1950s still do. Hiroshima, Mon Amour is speaking with a cinematic vernacular that clearly influenced directors like Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now) and contemporaries like Chris Marker (La Jetee). His work is not like a movie but an experimental novel. Resnais insisted on working with authors for his scripts, which resulted in a tone that could be perceived as cold. His Holocaust documentary short Night and Fog also keeps its distance from its subject matter and the audience. It makes his work align with Michelangelo Antonioni’s, another director grappling with the aftermath of fascism and how people can or can’t move on from what it did.

Where some movies play with time through flashbacks or moving in reverse, Resnais said that his intent was to shatter time with Hiroshima. There is no past, present, or future anymore. These individuals live in stasis, a movie reel of modern horrors playing in a loop in their minds. This is why they seek each other out while knowing little about the other. They share trauma as their bond, different experiences in different parts of the world, but stark reminders of how global violence can spill over and decimate everywhere. You are never really safe as long as war is a thing that can still happen. 

The Italian neorealists sought to portray life as lived by the working class, the modest reconstruction of war-torn communities. The French New Wave wanted to explode the medium, birthing new forms & telling stories of young people vibrant with life. The American cinema had only one purpose: to forget & distract. Real life was not getting into those entertainments for decades. While Resnais was French, his work didn’t feel cohesive with the New Wave movement. He is a contemporary but still very much making tightly constructed pictures. The work has little spontaneity, but that does not mean it is lifeless.

So much of Hiroshima, Mon Amour feels abstracted. No names, no lives glimpsed outside of these hazy, fever dream days. There is intimacy without knowledge. It doesn’t feel like a shallow hook-up; there is something substantive between these two. Her tragedy is personal; his is expansive. She is in a film about the war where she becomes overwhelmed on set. Where does the film end and the reality of the war begin? Characters get consistently overwhelmed, most often by their own memories, and have to take a step back. It is centered around an event the closest humanity has ever reached to truly seeing Hell on Earth. As the narration says regarding the atomic bombing: 

“Ten thousand suns, people will say. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will prevail. An entire city will be lifted off the ground, then fall back to earth in ashes.”

In the end, they name each other. He calls her Nevers, and she calls him Hiroshima. They are subsumed by their respective traumas, accepting those identifications because what is the Self when you’ve seen people turned to ashes? The movie tells us the official figures: Two hundred thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded in nine seconds. What sort of future is there when such monstrous acts are possible in this life?