Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959, Fr.)

In director Alain Resnais' first feature-length film (a co-production between France and Japan), it was one of the essential French New Wave films; the poignant plot, told in a non-linear narrative, was comprised of lengthy conversations between a French woman and her Japanese lover with brief intercut flashbacks representing their memories. The film's title could be rendered as: "Twenty-Four Hour Love Affair." The Academy Award-nominated Original Screenplay was written by French author Marguerite Duras.

• the opening, lengthy montage was set in Hiroshima (in the aftermath of the bombing, in August of 1957) - it was an erotic love scene in a hotel bed during a brief love affair (their first sexual encounter) between two adulterous married individuals - seen first as anonymous people
• their two discreetly-nude bodies were held together and entwined in an embrace - with both radioactive sparkling ash and then rain blowing across their sweaty skin (recollecting the horrific scenes of devastation caused by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima)

• the film presented visually horrific documentary images of the massive destruction in the blast city seen in reconstructions in the Hiroshima Peace museum, including the photographs of burn victims and mutilated survivors:
  • "...the scorched metal, the twisted metal, metal made as vulnerable as flesh. I saw the bouquet of bottle caps. Who would have thought? Human flesh, suspended, as if still alive, its agony still fresh. Stones, charred stones, shattered stones. Anonymous masses of hair that the women of Hiroshima, upon waking in the morning, would find had fallen out"
• although the man denied her assertions that she had seen everything in the museum: "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing," she insisted: "I saw everything"; the man was from Hiroshima, but had been away fighting in the war when the bombing obliterated his family
• the two lovers were:
  • "Elle/She" (Emmanuelle Riva), a lonely, unnamed French film actress who lived in Paris; she was in Hiroshima shooting an anti-war film (it was her film screen debut)
  • "Lui/He" (Eiji Okada), a married Japanese architect (he had fought in WWII)
• one of the film's sequences was about her past victimization, shaming and suffering; it was revealed in France years earlier that her first love was a German soldier during the war; her hair was shorn when the villagers found out about her secret relationship; its appearance was likened to the victims of the atomic bomb blast
• after a night of sex and talking, Elle/She stood on the hotel balcony-terrace the next morning wearing a kimono as she drank from a cup, and watching bicyclists on the street far below; she returned to the sight of her still-sleeping lover Lui/He in bed
• in the so-called "finger-twitch" sequence (the complete sequence was composed of 13 shots and lasted almost two minutes), she looked down at Lui/He's outstretched arm and right hand on the bed that was slightly twitching; suddenly, she had a traumatic, haunting, and terrible subliminal memory returning to 14 years earlier (an intrusion of the past into the present) to the similar sight of her dying, 23 year-old, bloody-faced German lover's twitching hand in Nevers, France (her native hometown) who was lethally shot during the town's liberation
• when the Japanese man stirred and awoke, she asked: "What were you dreaming about?"; he replied: "I don't know - why?" - she replied: "I watched your hands. They move when you sleep"; in response, he opened and closed his left hand, and said:
  • "Maybe it's when you dream without knowing it" (or "Sometimes a person dreams without knowing it")
• in the film's ending, they both decided to depart and admitted the distance between them; they gave each other names: "Hiroshima is my name" - "And your name is Nevers - in France"