Hiroshima Mon Amour
France/Japan, 1959, 90’, French, English, Japanese
Directed by: Alain Resnais
Screenplay: Marguerite Duras
Photography (b/w): Takahashi Michio, Sacha Vierny
Producers: Anatole Dauman, Samy Halfon
Production Companies: Argo Films, Como Films, Daiei Studios, Pathé
Cast: Emmanuelle Riva, Okada Eiji
Memory, time and space are recurring themes in Alain Resnais’ cinema. Hiroshima Mon Amour is concerned with remembered history (trauma), living with the past, and making sense of the present. French actress, Elle (the French pronoun for She/Her), visits Hiroshima to make a film; she spends a night with Lui (the French pronoun for He/Him), a Japanese architect she meets at a bar. Encouraging her to stay, Lui triggers a buried memory of Elle’s doomed love affair with a German soldier during WWII, as she witnesses the scars in Hiroshima left by the atomic bomb.
The interplay of complex emotions culminates in a magnificent sequence where the present and past are connected by diegetic sound – Elle’s recollection of the devastating finale of the love affair on screen is accompanied by the Japanese song playing in the restaurant. Here, Resnais connects time and space through devices that are uniquely cinematic. At this point for Elle, there is no separation between past and present, when war-time trauma brings the two times and spaces together.
But the film’s fascination also comes from the tension of an interracial relationship, of two people who were hitherto strangers. The alienation of a Caucasian woman staying in the Orient, and the attraction between her and an Asian man, are themes often featured in the works of Duras; in particular, The Lover (and its later film of the same name), India Song (film, 1975) and The Sea Wall.
There is hardly any plot in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Instead, the majority of the screen time involves the lovers engaged in extended, poetic dialogue about her past, and his present longing for her. In the second half of the film, Resnais pushes the abstraction to such extremes that the lovers appear to be the only inhabitants in a late, dark, empty Hiroshima, where a flashing neon light is the only proof of its existence. And the space they occupy becomes the very expression of their sense of loss and confusion; one wonders if somebody else is dreaming all this. Fragmented, illusive and ambiguous, the dialogue is characteristic of Duras’ vigour.
The film begins with a close-up of two bodies entwined in passion. Throughout the film, Lui is the “other”, alongside the symbols and many existences of Japan gazed upon with a beautiful curiosity that is not so much distinguishable from how Elle is exoticised by the Japanese people (and fetishized by Lui). This process of mutual fetishization neutralises races and gender as these gazes are negotiated by the characters, the filmmakers, and the audience.
What of the horror? It doesn’t happen on screen, but it is everywhere, its traces in the objects on display in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, in the enduring injuries of the survivors, in the streets, in the shops, in the physical and mental torture inflicted upon Elle. But besides horror, there is an irresistible sexuality in the endless conversation between Elle and Lui. As they put it, perhaps it comes from the understanding that they both know they will not see each other again. Perhaps it comes from the fact that for both of them, the “other” represents a territory that is far away, unusual, if almost forbidden.
Resnais’s film is less about the politics of interracial relationships, but more the juxtaposition of horror and sexuality; it is a sublime cinematic experience where the search for resonance between oneself and the other is at once haunting and devouring.
“I’ll remember you as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness.”
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais (1922-2014) was a major director of the French New Wave, often associated with the “Left Bank” auteurs. Trained as a film editor since the 1940s, he garnered universal acclaim with the essay film Night and Fog (1956), an important meditation on the Holocaust, and his debut feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), which deals with trauma in fictional terms. Bold in experimenting with narrative forms, Resnais regularly worked with innovative writers, including Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet; his later works are closely associated with theatre and performance.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1956 – Night and Fog
1959 – Hiroshima Mon Amour
1961 – Last Year at Marienbad
1963 – Muriel
1968 – Je t’aime, je t’aime
1980 – My American Uncle
1986 – Melo
1989 – I Want to Go Home
1993 – Smoking/No Smoking
2014 – Life of Riley