Hiroshima Mon Amour

This is a story about beginnings and endings about rebirth following tragedy. Moreover this is a story about memory. Fifteen years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a film crew arrives to make a film about peace. The actress in this film meets and has an intense affair with a Japanese man she meets in a bar on the night before she is to return to France.

In a startling series of flashbacks we learn of her love for a German soldier that left her ostracized in her native Nevers, France. The story, which all takes place in a twenty four hour period is striking because of its emotional impact. The atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima and the WWII romance destroyed the womans life. Now is the time to grow and to be reborn. Rebirth takes place through a confrontation with our memories of the past. A facing of the things that made us what we are. This is the sense the viewer takes from this film.

The Criterion DVD has an excellent transfer of the print which is presented in its original monural sound. The extras on the disc deserve a look. There is an excellent commentary by film historian Peter Cowie that helps to explain the marriage of film and literature between Resnais and Duras while offering some anecdotal technical information. Also included are vintage interviews with Alain Resnais and star Emmanuelle Reve. A 2003 interview with Reve is a highlight of the disc and should not be missed. The annotated selections of the script are also worth a brief look.

Anyone interested in the history of film should do themselves a favor and view this important film classic.


A remarkable depiction of remembering and forgetting   December 20, 1999
Kari Sullivan (CS, CO)
28 out of 33 found this review helpful

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the screenplay for the classic French film directed by Alain Resnais. This is one of the few screenplays I truly enjoy, as Hiroshima is a wonderful story about remembering and forgetting set in the context of post-nuclear war and love.

True to the classic stream-of-consciousness style of Duras, this screenplay is a highly emotional account of a French woman's journey to Hiroshima to film an anti-war movie and the affair with a Japanese man that ensues. Throughout the course of the affair, the woman is struck with the memory of her German lover during WWII and the insanity that his death brought on.

In many ways, this is Duras at her finest. She has an uncanny ability to take specific stories and bring them to a level of universality as far as human emotion and circumstance are concerned. This is a powerful and riveting tale that is not to be missed.


A couragious and honest exploration of love   June 9, 2001
C. Colt (San Francisco, CA United States)
15 out of 17 found this review helpful

As with most works of art that probe a subtle truth, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" will confuse a lot of people. On the surface, this film appears to be strange glimpse of failed romance and anti-social behavior. The characters, an unidentified French woman and Japanese man are having a brief and transitory love affair in Hiroshima, many years after World War II. Both of them are married (the man professes to love his wife) and neither is a stranger to anonymous love affairs.

Although neither party knows the other's name, they share crucial aspects of their history and identity with each other. The man is a resident of Hiroshima who was away serving in the army when the city was bombed. During the war, the woman lived in an occupied French city called Nevers and fell in love with a German soldier. When the soldier was killed the woman was punished for being a collaborator and was subsequently banished to her parents' basement for several month where in her own words she became "mad with spite".

The film opens by interweaving scenes of the man and woman making love, with scenes of Hiroshima bombing victims. This tells us that their story-particularly their love affair-is rooted in an act of unimaginable destruction. In the man's case, everything returns to the bombing of Hiroshima. When the woman tells him of the different monuments and documentary footage of the bombing she encountered, he replies that she has seen nothing. In the woman's case, her entire life was redefined the moment her German lover was killed by French partisans. The act of destruction was personally more traumatic and pivotal than the war itself. Worse yet was her tremendous sense of failure in surviving this event and being able to continue life without her lover. The man is inescapably a product of the bombing of Hiroshima just as the woman is a product of her experience in Nevers.

The woman tells the man that until her affair with him, she has never loved anyone the way she loved the German soldier. She shares her sense of failure at having survived the death of the German solider with the man.

The beginning of courtship and love often involves putting one's best foot forward, so to speak-of promoting oneself in order to appeal to the other person. But this film argues that the foundation of love is something more sacred and more sensible. It is often a person's deepest sense of failure, fear, or inadequacy that defines who that person really is. The woman attests to this by stating that her true sense of self began when she emerged from her eight months of confinement in her parents' basement. She tells the man that aside from him, no one including her husband understands that that experience made her who she is today. The Japanese man expresses great joy in being the only one in the world who knows. He comprehends the magnitude of her gift and its testament of her love for him.

The love affair between the man and the woman is a doomed and paradoxical one. The woman gives herself to the man completely, but she can only do so because their relationship is free of any obligation to each other. They meet only for the purpose of loving each other under anonymous and temporary conditions. For them no other role is possible. At the end of the film, the loves part without revealing their names. The woman tells the man his name is "Hiroshima" and he replies, "Yes, and yours is Nevers. Nevers in France." In refusing to disclose their names, the lovers banish their public identities from the momentary world that they have created for themselves. A love affair is essentially the creation of a new world that is populated only by two people under specific conditions. Entirely new things become important. Streets, restaurants, and hotel rooms that would normally mean nothing suddenly take on an incalculable significance. In this case, Hiroshima is the place where their love affair takes place, which implies that the city is destroyed twice: first by the bombing and then by the end of the affair. Of course the film begins with the scenes of the lovers intertwined with scenes of the bombing. In the years to come, whenever the woman hears of Hiroshima she will immediately think of both. Like the love that defined who she was as a human being, this one too is rooted in unimaginable destruction.

While the film is superb in its own right, one should really read the original screen play by Marguerite Duras since it sheds much light on the characters in the film. The screen play describes the Japanese man as having Western features and hardly looking like a typical Asian male. Duras purposely requested this so that viewers would not see the Japanese man as exotic or unusual. The Japanese is further described as being worldly in the sense that he is conversant in several languages and involved in politics. Duras states that he is the kind of man who would be at home in any country. Similarly the woman is described as being not very beautiful. In the film the man tells her that he was first interested in her because she looked bored. The attraction defies typical filmic cliches but makes sense is subtle ways.

While this film may alienate many viewers, it will hopefully leave most with a deeper impression and with a series of questions. What does it really mean to love someone? What is the real definition of fidelity? What else does war destroy besides physical things such as people, materials, and the environment? What is trust? What defines a person's identity, success or failure?


Deep Emotional Connection?   October 13, 2002
Jason Marshall (Anaheim, CA United States)
15 out of 36 found this review helpful

I have been reading these glowing reviews and i can't help but wonder if we all saw the same film. "Hiroshima Mon Amour" is a tedious and pretentious film. So many of the past reviewers spoke of the deep emotional connection between the two lovers, but it seems they're seeing what they want to be there and not what is. All I saw was a clingy man badgering a woman until she spilled her guts and then he couldn't get her to stop talking if he wanted (and the scary part is he did not want her to stop).

Another misconception I've read over and over is this film is about the suffering about BOTH the Riva and Okada characters, but it isn't. The Okada character tells his French lover his entire family died in Hiroshima and he was in the army. It was all over in 20 seconds. But Riva's character blathers on for nearly the rest of the movie about losing her German lover during the war. And this all brings me to the latent racism of the film: Only a European or an American could make a film with Hiroshima in the title, set it in Hiroshima and have one of the main characters a Japanese man who lost everyone dear to him in Hiroshima, but the movie isn't really about Hiroshima (though a lot of people seem to be under the impression it is equally about that as the French town of Nevers). Apparently Resnais and Duras felt the French character's story was more emotionally worthy and the Japanese character, despite the rich possibilities, should just act as a sounding board. Resnais could have really set the picture anywhere.. London, or Delhi, or St. Louis, or La Paz. At least then he wouldn't have been patronizing the experiences and pain of the Japanese victims of the atomic bomb.

Overall I think all these 5 star reviews are by people who think they should like it because of the message(who could argue against an anti-war message), or because they've been told they're supposed to like it if they have any intelligence at all. I just find it incredible so many people got through this picture with a straight face.


french new wave - crashing bore   October 8, 2003
15 out of 47 found this review helpful

At the time of this writing, there was only one one-star review amidst the 5 and 4-star accolades. I'm writing this in support of the one who had the courage to stand alone against the cinematic intelligentsia who find powerful meaning and artistic beauty in this film.
After reading such superlatives as, "one of the most influencial films of all time", I had to check it out. I'll admit that I'm not a fan of foreign film in general and my exposure to older European cinema consists of "Metropolis","Night and Fog","The Seventh Seal" and "The Pasion of Joan of Arc", but I can appreciate each of them for their artistry and contribution to cinema. "Hiroshima Mon Amour" was to me, a failed experiment.
On the surface, it seems to be a story about a self-absorbed French nymphomaniac, Elle, slowly loosing her mind as she reveals her past to a casual sex partner, Lui, that she's just met in Hiroshima. They're both "happily married", which in 1959 apparently meant that all adulterous encounters were limited to one-night stands. In spite of their powerful connection, they both know that a lasting relationship is out of the question. As she pours her heart out to him in a bar, sometimes she talks about the past as if it were the present, other times she doesn't. She describes a forbiddden love affair with a German soldier (during WWII) and how she was tortured by her family because of it; someone shaves her head and confines her in a cellar. She talks to Lui as if she is reliving her past and he is the German soldier. So what does Lui ask her after hearing this? He wants to know if it ever rained. She replies, "Along the walls". What have these people been smoking? Director Resnais fails utterly to make any of this understandable. I've read that this story is about memory and how without it, we can't know that we exist. If you suddenly woke up with your memory wiped clean, you'd be mightily confused, but you'd know that you exist; "I think, therefore I am". In the film, Lui says to Elle, "In a few years when I have forgotten you...I'll remember you as the symbol of love's forgetfulness". I'll remember when I've forgotten?? You're a symbol of love's forgetfulness...whom I remember?? Yeah, OK, now if I can just remember to forget this film.