Hiroshima mon amour (1959) - film review

A young French actress is making an anti-war film in the rebuilt Japanese city of Hiroshima, which was devastated in a nuclear bomb blast at the end of the Second World War.  Here, she has an affair with a Japanese architect, even though both of them are happily married.  The actress admits that she will soon have to fly back home to Paris, but she spends one last night with her lover.  At a café, she recounts the story of her first tragic love with a German soldier during the war....

The French film director and critic Claude Chabrol described Hiroshima mon amour as the best film he had seen in 500 years.  It is certainly a landmark in French cinema, a modernist masterpiece that combines a love story of exceptional poignancy with a sombre reflection on man’s inhumanity to man.  It is a film that still has a powerful resonance, not just because it deals with universal and immutable themes, but because it brings a terrifying proximity to the prospect of nuclear annihilation.  Love and global mass destruction may not sound like plausible bedfellows but their juxtaposition in this film is extremely effective and drives home the one great paradox of human experience, our capacity to love and make war with equal intensity.  Perhaps our inability to forget what happened to Hiroshima is an expression of love, but is it merely guilt masquerading as love?  This emotional confusion is in essence what this film is about.  Just as the West is still haunted by the atrocity that was perpetrated against two Japanese cities in WWII, so the film’s heroine remains mired in the muddled trauma of a past love affair that ended in tragedy.  By not acknowledging the past honestly, we make ourselves its prisoner ad pertpetuum.  If we had accepted the reality of Hiroshima, nuclear weapons would long have been a thing of the past.

Hiroshima mon amour was the first full-length fictional film to be directed by Alain Resnais.  Whilst Resnais is often associated with the French New Wave (by dint of the fact that he came to prominence just as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and the rest were beginning to make an impact), he was in fact already an experienced filmmaker by the time he made this film and would continually distance himself from la Nouvelle Vague.  Since the end of the Second World War, Resnais had made a respectable career for himself as a documentary filmmaker, winning widespread acclaim with Nuit et brouillard (1955), a harrowing exposé on the Nazi concentration camps.   Other notable films include Guernica (1950), Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) and Toute la memoire du monde (1955).  Hiroshima mon amour itself started out as a documentary, commissioned by the producers of Nuit et brouillard as an anti-H-bomb protest film.  After several attempts, Resnais realised that he was not equipped to make a film about the atomic bomb.  He admitted as much to the novelist Marguerite Duras, and she replied: why not make the film into a love story?  This off-the-wall idea appealed to Resnais and so he persuaded Duras to write the script, her first for the cinema.  Duras not only extricated Resnais from his creative impasse, she also enabled him to craft one of the most sublime pieces of cinema art, one for which she deserves a fair proportion of the credit (along with the two lead actors, Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada).

The film begins with one of the most striking opening sequences ever seen in the cinema - a beautifully composed montage of close-up shots of a couple making love.  Never before had audiences been subjected to such an overt expression of carnal desire, and yet so artfully constructed is this sequence that it transcends mere eroticism.  Silken limbs that are initially showered in ash are cleansed by water drops - just as we may wish that our collective memory of Hiroshima may be washed away by the passage of time.  What then follows is a ten-minute sequence comprising documentary footage, over which the two lovers purge their thoughts after their love-making.  "You have never seen Hiroshima", he insists.  She is adamant that she has.  When prompted by her Japanese lover, the woman recounts her first love affair, with a German solider just before the liberation of France in 1944.  As the Japanese man is still traumatised by his recollection of the atomic explosion that wiped out his entire family, so the French woman remains scarred by the dismal outcome of her first amorous adventure.  The more they reflect on their past, the more the two protagonists realise they are in love - but by yielding to this love, do they betray the past or sanctify it?

One of the central motifs of the film - the relationship between time and memory - is one that Resnais would explore in many of his subsequent films (but never with the blistering lucidity that we see here).  As the heroine’s past and present realities are inter-played, we sense that time is an entirely illusory phenomenon.  Memory obliterates any notion of temporal separation - it as if the heroine’s two sets of experiences are happening concurrently, the one colouring the other.   It would appear that the heroine cannot even distinguish her latest Japanese lover from the German soldier she had a love affair with fourteen years previously.  Is it possible that the two episodes are merely two reflections of the same one occurrence, like a sculpture seen from two different angles?   Just as time collapses, so does space - tracking shots of the heroine’s home town are inter-cut with those of neon-lit modern-day Hiroshima, implying the two separate realities are in fact one.   But is this conflation of time and space no more than a desperate attempt by the heroine to reconcile herself with her traumatic past?  The fact that she is reluctant to continue her Japanese love affair shows us the power that her past exerts over her - her memory is a vicious web from which she can never escape, not until she can resolve the emotional confusion. 

The relationship between time and memory is just as central to Resnais’s next film, L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), although in this film the director employs a far more abstract approach.  The concrete certainties that make Resnais’s first film so accessible and readily understandable are virtually obliterated in his second, which, with its dreamlike composition, surreal flourishes and absence of solid characters, is frustratingly ambiguous, and yet just as hypnotic and meaningful.   After these two great works, Resnais’s subsequent career would be something of an anti-climax, although critics and audiences would be kind to him and he would periodically deliver films that recaptured his former brilliance - for example, Muriel (1963), Providence (1977) and Coeurs (2006).  Whilst the films of Alain Resnais continue to beguile, stimulate and provoke, none can match the unsullied beauty and reflective potency of Hiroshima mon amour, one of the greatest of all French films.

© James Travers 2011

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