User reviews

Hiroshima Mon Amour is brilliantly made and brilliantly acted, with a thoughtful, poetic script by the great French writer, Marguerite Duras. Its images are lyrical, disturbing, fascinating, and its anti-war message is profound and still frighteningly relevant. But in terms of strict entertainment...

Any film which begins with abstracted images of the entwined body parts of human lovers, slowly becoming encrusted with ash and (presumably) atomic fallout... and then spends an obscure 15 minutes arguing about the death and disfigurement of multitudes during the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima, and the nature of memory and forgetfulness... well, you realize immediately that this movie isn't set up to go anyplace fun. Unless your idea of "fun" is witnessing someone else's graphic misery without the cleansing catharsis that accompanies a more conventional tragedy. Hey, some people enjoy that kind of thing! Not me, but to each his/her own.

Despite a structure which is famous for meandering through time, the film's narrative is fairly cogent and non-confusing, which is a plus. But the central illicit, inter-racial affair between a French actress and the Japanese architect whom she hooks up with during a film shoot in Hiroshima... It doesn't really make any sense. From the tiny acorn of a chance hookup, grows a mad-passionate love affair based almost entirely on memories dredged from the actress' past, which she disgorges to the architect, rather like a colorless Scheherezade, as she loses all rational connection to the present, conflating a youthful indiscretion with a deceased German soldier (and her subsequent descent into madness) with the non-happenings surrounding her current Japanese amour. German, Japanese... clearly, she can't tell these Axis races apart! I understand that the point of the film was not to create strict narrative coherence, but rather to delve into some kind of symbolic and psychic clash between this cold-yet-overwrought union of a French woman and her obsessed Japanese lover, and the horrors of War. But, despite some moments which are outright absurdist in effect, the overall tone of the film is grinding in its humorlessness. As I watched the characters fatalistically surrendering to their doom, all I could think was, "man, that Marguerite Duras must have been a drag to be romantically involved with." I mean, the Duras script, for all it's poetic symbolism and intellectual brilliance, etc etc, tells a story of people who are criminally passive and hopelessly clingy. Love seems to transform her characters into mere victims, of love, of war, of life, masochistically reveling in their own operatic suffering while doing virtually nothing. As the nameless SHE recalls her own suffering during her madness, scraping her fingertips off on the saltpeter-encrusted walls of her parent's cellar-prison, then receiving validation of existence by luxuriously sucking her own blood from her ravaged hands because otherwise she is utterly alone, all I could think was... Oh brother! This character is so badly damaged, how did she ever manage to get happily married before she embarked on this chance affair in Japan? The imagery is fabulous and intense, but are these really human beings that could have plausibly embarked on a journey together? One human being, actually, because the Japanese architect is little more than a handsome cipher of "love"... love, in this story, apparently meaning the obsession that arises from the act of physical copulation, an experience which is equated with destruction of the nuclear holocaust variety. So, Marguerite Duras clearly had issues surrounding her expression and experience of sexuality. And the film betrays little in the way of empathy, either, the characters are infused with an undercurrent of intense selfishness as they struggle to connect. HE is constantly delving into HER unhappy past even though it can give neither of them any pleasure or joy. The more HE delves, the more SHE becomes hopelessly entangled, and the more obsessed HE becomes... until the cold and bitter end.

At least in an opera, you get to revel in an outpouring of passion! In this bitter pill, everything is so cold and humorless... well, it really is difficult to understand why people wax enthusiastic over this film so much. There is much here to ADMIRE... but not much to love, in my opinion. Except intellectually, because the film is awash with symbolism and thought-provoking moments. As a viewing experience for the average intellectual, such as myself, however, I felt that once was enough. The time jumping and abstractions and other critically lauded elements of this movie have been done better and more entertainingly by others. Though this is the most emotionally powerful anti-nuclear statement I've ever seen, for which, as someone who had much of his family die in the Hiroshima nuclear blast, I am profoundly grateful.

"Hiroshima mon amour" (1959) is an extraordinary tale of two people, a French actress and a Japanese architect - a survivor of the blast at Hiroshima. They meet in Hiroshima fifteen years after August 6, 1945 and become lovers when she came there to working on an antiwar film. They both are hunted by the memories of war and what it does to human's lives and souls. Together they live their tragic past and uncertain present in a complex series of fantasies and nightmares, flashes of memory and persistence of it. The black-and-white images by Sasha Vierney and Mikio Takhashi, especially the opening montage of bodies intertwined are unforgettable and the power of subject matter is undeniable. My only problem is the film's Oscar nominated screenplay. It works perfectly for the most of the film but then it begins to move in circles making the last 20 minutes or so go on forever.

It's nearly impossible to talk about "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" in the same language I use to talk about other films. Even people used to international cinema may find themselves somewhat boggled by this visual tone poem. It's beautiful, and it leaves a distinct impression, but it does so in the way that a striking and unexpected image would, not in the way that an accessible film narrative would. Therefore, it interests without ever fully engaging.

To say that Resnais' film has something in common with silent cinema would be misleading, because sound certainly matters. But the movie definitely feels like a piece of non-verbal cinema, where sensation matters more than cognition.

A movie I probably need to see again to truly appreciate.

Grade: A

This film has been compared to "Citizen Kane," not because of the story itself, but the way it is told, and through innovative artistic devices. The screenplay is highly poetic even when describing destruction, death, and madness. Several jump cuts in time occur with voice-over, and, at the beginning, voice-over during a montage of frightening images from the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing and the bodies of the two lovers in bed. The characters represent different cities; the Japanese man, Hiroshima, the French woman, a city in France, Nevers (was this intentional?), but the latter might as well represent any outside nation. While "Hiroshima," even after being destroyed by an "ally" of France, falls in love with her and wants her to stay, despite his claims that she can never know what the bombing was really like, yet leaving this in the past without forgetting, "France" is hung up on a dead Nazi soldier whom she had loved, and became an outcast because of it. What the soldier really seems to represent is not the Nazis, but rather a real, true love that transcended nationalities and associations. France's past is personal and fears forgetting it, while Hiroshima's is communal and, while not wanting to forget, also wants to move ahead. For this reason Hiroshima keeps trying to convince France to stay so that they can be in love, but France is too preoccupied with its own personal ghost that it cannot share, which is why it is a major breakthrough for her when she tells her tragic story for the first time to anyone, Hiroshima. Hiroshima's past tragedy being communal is shared and it wants to share with the rest of the world. France's tragedy is personal and is only beginning to be shared. It takes the entire film before the two characters can get to a beginning of something more than their differences and likenesses of tragedy and loss in the past, and this beginning is who they really are, in the present, two people reborn from these tragedies.

As a college freshman some 45 years ago, I saw this film in the student union They had a commitment to art films. I have to say that I do remember the stream of dialog between the two characters but little about the content. I knew he (the Japanese man) had lost his family on that August day. I recall her pulling inward as he becomes a bit demanding. Watching it with mature eyes and a fresh view of the world, I was brought back to these two traumatized characters and the war that changed them forever. It begins with a discussion of the Hiroshima museum which contains pictures and artifacts from that fateful day. He keeps telling her that she has not seen Hiroshima as they lay entwined in bed. His pain is more predictable. He lost his family that day while he was away. Hers takes a more melancholy road. As she opens up, she tells the story of a love affair with a German soldier whom she would meet in all manner of places. One day she found him dying, curled up on the ground. She sits with him until he dies. New of their trysts gets out and she is ostracized by her community, her hair cropped, beaten, and thrown in a cellar by her own family. She has not told this story to anyone, including her own husband, until now. While she feels somewhat liberated the pain is too deep. The Japanese man, also married, wants her to stay in Hiroshima. The movie is about the relationship going forward with such damaged people. She repeatedly tries to escape him, but he keeps resurfacing. The sad thing is that she desires him and so it's not as if she is being stalked. Resnais is a master with the camera, using black and white contrasting images, engaging flashbacks, close-ups. One really marvelous scene is where the young woman, who has been playing a small part in an anti-war film, is nearly trampled by protesters carrying signs. Hiroshima is constantly in her face. She has been hurt so badly by the war and is carrying a load of guilt. War carries with it a loss of innocence and pain beyond the obvious. This film really captures this.

This is surely one of the most impressive movies i know. It is also a very impressive portrait of a woman. Don't expect to see an ordinary love story -it is as not so much a love story as a story of a wounded person meeting a wounded city. A story about two people hurt by peace. Even though it is over more than four decennia old it feels surprisingly new. The reason for this must be the beautiful photography -starting with the very first shots of the two lovers- and the deliberate moving away from conventional script writing by Marguerite Dumas. The movie has the feel of an opera, with the music of Georges Delerue as a moving force. I thought it was enchanting, and it stayed with me for days after.

In the beginning it was the intention that Alain Resnais would make a documentary about the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, just as he had made a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps ("Night and fog", 1956).

Ultimately Resnais decided to make a feature film based on a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It has become a feature film with one of the strangest opening scenes I have ever seen. We see a couple making love in extreme close up alternated with documentary footage of the devastations wrought by the atomic bomb. The body's of the couple are being sprinkled with sand, without doubt symbolizing nuclear fallout. On top of that there is a conversation in which the woman claims she knows everything about the bomb because she has visited the museum and participated in the guided tour and the man responds that she knows nothing. This conversation highlights the difference between objective- and subjective (or experiential) knowledge, but the question is when did it take place? It probably isn't their bedtime (love making) conversation, isn't it?

The loving couple is a French woman (Elle / She, played by Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Lui / Him, played by Eiji Okada). Both have suffered from the Second World War. His family was killed by the bomb when he was somewhere else as a soldier. She had a love affair with a German soldier who later got killed and was punished and humiliated after the war.

The love affair with Lui wakes up memory's in Elle about her earlier love affair. As spectator we only become fully aware of this only later in the film. The flashbacks about what happened in France are in long shots and with a static camera, the present in Japan are mainly medium shots and close ups with a moving camera. I think the director wanted to show that the past has been frozen in the memory of the woman while the present has not taken his definite shape yet.

"Hiroshima mon amour" is a well thought out film. It is a film about dialogue and not about action. The dialogue is philosophical and, I have to say it, a little artificial. The two main (or only) characters in essence discuss with each other the reliability of memory and the possibility of real communication. Can a European really understand what has been going on in Asia and vice versa?

I have seen other films with no action and only dialogue ("Locke", 2013, Steven Knight) and also other films revolving around a philosophical theme ("Rashomon", 1950, Akira Kurosawa). In the first mentioned the dialogues definitely were more natural and in "Rashomon" the philosophical question (if "the objective truth" really exists) was asked with more clarity.

As a follow up to his monumental documentary "Nuit et brouillard" (Night and Fog), Resnais continues in his war motif with a chilling and powerful statement on the post-modernist, post-war world. An incarnation of a Marguerite Duras screen-play, "Hiroshima mon amour" depicts the confusion surrounding an eracinated and war-stricken people.

Questioning the possibility of Mimesis--"Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien!" (You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing!)-- Resnais rejects the notion of re-creation or imitation, conforming to the philosophies of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida and thus calling into question his own efforts in "Nuit et brouillard." At the same time, he adheres to the Aristotelian ideal that the purpose of Mimesis is the cathartic effect produced by pity and terror, and not merely the representation.

Appealing also to Freudian psychoanalysis, the characters are forced to re-examine the effects of the pathology in attempt to reconstruct the past and determine the cause. (Notice Resnais' use of lighting in the reconstruction scene.) Subtle clues throughout enable the viewer to piece together the story and perform their own psychoanalysis of the situation. A young woman from Nevers, France vows to "never" return to her hometown and the viewer is left to determine the cause.

In my opinion, one of the top ten films of all time, "Hiroshima mon amour" is a work of art that all lovers of cinema must see. Resnais is a cinematographic genius, and his ambivalent depiction of post-war Japan and France in the characters of "Him" and "Her" make this film a cultural landmark as well as masterpiece of post-war, post-modernist art.

This film is an acknowledged classic of World Cinema and I can certainly appreciate that it is a very well-made film and possibly even a great one, but I didn't like it.

The film revolves around a married French film actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who has a passionate affair with a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) while she is filming on location in Hiroshima for an anti-war film. The affair triggers memories of the actress' first love affair with a German soldier in occupied France.

The film's main concerns seem to be memory and it's relation to the present and healing. The film is beautifully made with a poetic and elegant screenplay from novelist Marguerite Duras, but it remained curiously uninvolving. All the style and formality prevented any real engagement with the characters. It also suffers from moments of monumental pretentiousness. It is worth watching for World Cinema fans, just because of it's reputation, but others should really approach with caution.

One would hope a film like this would actually cause humankind to take a step back and to foster the destruction of destruction itself. As Duras noted many years later in her semi-autobiographical "The Lover," she made the distinction early on between those who would exploit and destroy the weak and those who would protect them.

Here we have the exponential dynamic of this distinction in spades, realized in unthinkably tragic dimensions. Put in the simplest terms, "Hiroshima" is war personalized and psychologized in the language of love. It is the lovers' dialogue that begins to rouse the past; it is within the protective bond of love that atrocities can be drawn forth.

It is better to simply see the film than to depend on any synopsis. Once you do, its "medicine" will work within you --- and the medicine to which I refer is love.

There are a few sources that I've read on the Internet that herald Hiroshima Mon Amour as the first film of the French New Wave movement of the late 1950s, early 60s. This raises a few interesting points and, if truth be told, I wasn't getting that vibe that so many others seem to be so sure of in regards to the film in question being of the French New Wave variety. I think the sense of that low budget feel is there but this is essentially a romance film, a genre picture if you like. It is a film looking at two people in a relationship but, crucially, taking the time to acknowledge the world around them and how certain events brought them to have this relationship in the first place. It is additionally interesting to note that while it has been known for the French New Wave to take a surrealist look at the youth of the day, Hiroshima Mon Amour likes awfully the notion of looking back into decades gone by at what was and how that contributes to today's world.

That isn't to say Hiroshima Mon Amour is a bad film, it's just Bob le flambeur, for me, is the beginnings of said movement. Hiroshima Mon Amour is more a study of events and people by the people that we study in this film. It is a reconciliation of times gone by and a statement that these things will, hopefully, refrain from happening again. It begins with two people making love or engaging in the act of reproduction as images of the horrific results of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb blast are inter-cut in a sort of odd, juxtaposed series of images displaying acts that introduce life into the world and the results of certain other acts that propel massive amounts of death.

The two in question are Elle (Riva), French for 'She' or 'Her', who's an actress in Hiroshima and Lui (Okada), a Japanese architect who's actually from Hiroshima. A lot of the film is musings by these two people; on life, the global situation, their relationship and their pasts. The film is very concentrated in its study of these two people in this particular city, having this particular relationship and whatever politics it wants to get across it introduces with Elle wanting to quite clearly recognise the Hiroshima disaster and Lui initially just discarding it, something quite surprising for someone Japanese to do; then again, maybe he was just more interested in her than his opinion of his semi-destroyed town given the timing of when the conversation was raised.

What is born out of this opening, which continues combines documentary style footage inter-cut with said people, is a further scene that really points out its political stance and that's a demonstration about the weapon of mass destruction. So you, as do we all when watching, get the picture that the H-bomb was wrong in this filmmaker's opinion which is fine – that's done, what's next? Fortunatley, the film does open up further and didn't become what I was fearing: a dreary and fictionalised account that slips in and out of the documentary thus demanding some sort of artistic labelling just because it 'looks' like an avant-garde piece.

The conversation that I think saves the piece occurs between the two leads as they talk of past activity. Lui points out that he's from Hiroshima and, had he not been fighting in the Japanese army during the war, he surely would've been killed by 'the bomb' had he still been at home. Additionally, had the bomb never have fallen, Elle would not be there working as an actress and consequently, she would never had met Lui. It's a brief but quite an unnervingly optimistic turnaround given all the 'anti' politics the film had given us prior to this. It's a look at hope; something positive born out of something the author clearly stated previously he thought was negative.

But this is it, and I say that with as much positivity as possible. It is a lot of fancy switching from real life footage to two people rolling around in bed. It is a film that wants to say more about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima than anything else, despite desperately trying to force its way into a genre towards the end when Elle reveals a 'past tragedy' in the sense she loved a German soldier in France during the occupation and suffered at the hands of others when word got out and the war ended. All of that feels included for sake of a runtime, something I didn't expect I'd be coming away from "the film that started the French New Wave" thinking. But the film is solid overall; it has that uncanny feel to it – that feel and that clear sense of inspiration. It is most things from 1942's Casablanca to 1995's Before Sunrise, meshed into one and with a political agenda. It is a tragedy at the end of the day and rather impressively, I think we feel for those who lost their lives in Hiroshima that day in August 1945, as well as for the two leads themselves when certain revelations become apparent right near the end – which in itself is a pretty impressive achievement.

The comparison between heart break and the Hiroshima bombing is beautiful. The film is about the pain of memories forgotten and remembered. Just as the pain of lost love will be forgotten so too have the horrors of Hiroshima. The scars will always be there but that feeling of pain and isolation as the world celebrates while you mourn will be lost in the past. Lui is helping to rebuild Hiroshima as an architect and Elle has fled Nevers, the place of her love affair with a German soldier. The film represents Frech New Wave in it's reaction against the Hollywood style. The plot is reminiscent of Brief Encounter and Casablanca (they even go to a bar called Casablanca at one point) but the films style is vastly different. Action will jump in time while conversation remains the same, the story jumps around chronologically and we are often unsure of where precisely in time we are. The reason it sets itself apart from other new ave films is it's use of style. Jump cuts and screwing with the chronology are not used because they can be but for a purpose. The chronology is off because the scenes are memories acting like real memories and flowing randomly. The cuts help accentuate how little time these two lovers have with each other before they will be parted. An excellent film well-deserved of it's excellent reputation.

Quite simply the most touching, inspiring and turbulent film I have ever seen. Although not as gripping as an action film, this piece causes the same emotional rollercoaster.

Resnais, with only 2 characters and 90 minutes manages to capture the extremes of life. The delight of first love and the passion of lust is opposed by the pitfalls of human nature - the way we forget even those things we try, so hard, to keep hold of.

I understand how many people may find this film tedious, admittedly the narrative is hardly full of excitement however it reflects humanity so perfectly, and so deeply, that the film almost hurt as I recognised so much of my own life within it.

As said, as good as any action film!

This is one of my personal favorites. The film is not really a (anti)war-film - it is about memories of love and passion amplified and focused by the urgency of war, and unexpectedly re-awakened and re-visited many years later. Sit back and enjoy the visual imagery and the hypnotic sound of the voices and the music as we experience the intensely private and personal emotions of the protagonist. It is almost like a silent movie at times, with the dialogue relegated to the role of the musical accompaniment. But what accompaniment! Duras' prose is almost poetic and it is unfortunate for those who do not understand French that the rhythmic beauty of the language is muted in the subtitles.

The film is definitely not for everyone. It is rather slow; the plot_line non-linear and rather thin (this is admitted in the film itself...), and some of the elements of the film - ie. the peace demonstration are oddly out of place. Some will be unable to identify with the main character, and find her whining "de trop.. ".

Dommage...

This movie isn't a movie. It's a poem. When poetry becomes film you get this kind of masterpieces. It's a slow-paced, beautifully shot, heartbreaking love story. It's a touching, human, meaningful film about oblivion. Duras' prose is just unbelievably poetic and Riva's performance as an independent –yet so attached to her lost lover– woman brings the film to a new level of groundbreaking way of storytelling. The dialogues between her and Okada are about things we've all thought and felt every now and then. It takes place in Hiroshima fifteen years after the bomb and I find it brilliant how the movie talks about the global tragedy that was the dropping of an atomic bomb and the personal tragedy that is to lose and try not to forget the man you loved. As it is the script what struck me the most, I personally don't think this is as much as a Resnais' film as it is Duras'. Almost 60 years already. Everyone with a major role in the movie is gone. But they are not dead. They just became "Hiroshima Mon Amour". Might we not forget them.

Although already a fan of Last Year At Marienbad, nothing prepared me for Hiroshima. The film seems to glide along (and is obsessed by this movement) at a pace all of its own, drawing us into a labyrinth of memories, history and desire. Part anti-war documentary, part philosophical treatise, part psychological study, partly its own love affair with its medium. While the performances are slightly dated, you soon accept them and are beguiled by Sacha Vierny's stark cinematography and its hypnotic score. Its place in modern cinema is striking. Without it no Wang Kar Wai, no Peter Greenaway (who 'stole' away its cinematographer) I am not sure what it ultimately 'said' about the bomb, the war or our fictional memories and desires... as it seems to seduce through absence rather than auteurist presence (at the other end of the spectrum to Goddard perhaps) but was content to puzzle its enigma. Beautiful.

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) filming an anti-war film in Hiroshima has an affair with a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) as they share their differing perspectives on war.

This film started out as a documentary, which seems evident from all the footage of Hiroshima following World War II. But then Marguerite Duras was brought in to add a fictionalized element. I think that was an interesting choice. Although Duras was a known writer and director in France, to Americans she is probably only known for her novel "The Lover", about an affair between a French woman and a Chinese man, not a far removal from this romance.

The film was a major catalyst for the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave), making highly innovative use of miniature flashbacks to create a uniquely nonlinear storyline. While (in my opinion) not nearly as accomplished as the director's "Last Year at Marienbad", the influence is striking, and it is a shame that Alain Resnais is not better known in America.

A poetic and haunting film about the tragedy of death, the ability people have of picking up the pieces and moving on, and yet history inexorably repeating itself, both in individual lives and with mankind. It's got an undercurrent of anti-war messaging in it as we see the horrifying results of the atomic bomb in graphic detail, but the film is more than that. The cinematography is beautiful, both in Hiroshima and the Loire Valley, and director Alain Resnais tells the story brilliantly via flashbacks and meaningful little moments, those which would stand out in one's memory.

The premise is fairly simple: a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) has a short affair with a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) while she's in Hiroshima acting in a film, but both of them know it's short-lived. They're both married, she's due to fly back to France, and she confesses that she's never gotten over a forbidden affair she had as a teenager with a German soldier fourteen years earlier, during the war. She's still traumatized by this, so much so that she sees this new lover as a version of the man she knew from the past, and a pale version at that. As she speaks about it, she uses pronouns as if she were still talking to her old lover, and we can see from the flashbacks just how crushed she was - driven to madness, shunned by the French townspeople as a traitor, and made to live silently in a cold cellar by her parents. It's a harrowing tale.

The love she has in Hiroshima has some incredible erotic moments, even if they are brief and restrained. Keep an eye on Emmanuelle Riva's hands in this film as she caresses him; they are so loving. And yet, the film is quite brutal in its honesty, and he's forced to hear both her memories from the past and, towards the end, see another man approach her, visualizing how replaceable he is. He's just a link in a chain for her, just as she is for him. "I meet you. I remember you. Who are you?" she says, and "I don't mind being like a thousand women to you." It's a cynical view of love that may leave you cold, particularly as Marguerite Duras' script borders on pretentiousness at times.

In putting the tragedy of a single soldier's death next to the death of hundreds of thousands of people at Hiroshima, it reinforces how tragic all of those lives lost were; they all had their own stories, even if in both cases they were part of "the enemy." However, it's even more tragic when we reflect that mankind will move on, soon forget, and repeat the same mistakes, just as lovers move on, soon forget, and meet new lovers. We see a dual to the horror of forgetting war when he says "Some years from now, when I have forgotten you and other romances like this one have recurred through sheer habit, I will remember you as a symbol of love's forgetfulness. This affair will remind me how horrible forgetting is." This is echoed in her lines "Just as in love, there is this illusion, this illusion that you will never be able to forget, the way I had the illusion, faced with Hiroshima, that I would never forget." Forgetting to some extent is necessary to heal and move on even when it seems impossible, and yet it can also be inevitable, and render what we forget meaningless. It's interesting to think about.

One of the little scenes early on that I loved was when he visits her 'peace movie' set, and the two of them begin talking. As she smiles at him in the sunshine, a demonstrator walks by carrying a picture of a victim of the bombing, which is a somber juxtaposition, and yet so subtly executed by Resnais. There are countless other moments, including when we see the various places she and the German soldier find to carry on with each other, which has overtones of cheapness and lust, and yet, also love trying to find a way in an impossible time. Just as she's irreparably damaged by the love of her life's death, so mankind seems irreparably changed after the Hiroshima bombing. What a fascinating response she has to his question about what Hiroshima meant to her: "The end of the war... completely, I mean. Astonishment that they dared, astonishment that they succeeded. And for us, the start of an unknown fear. Then, indifference. And fear of that indifference." It's an existential moment in a brave new world, and perhaps that's what this film really is - an existential romance, one that is devastating.

This isn't the movie I expected, and I mean that simply on account of how challenging a view it is. Yes, some of the imagery of or reflections on the destruction of Hiroshima are tragic and disturbing, but difficult content is a different matter. No, what makes this so challenging is the emphatically sideways and underhanded approach to its storytelling, and the presentation of its themes. There's the active narrative of the time that the man and woman spend together - and then there are the fragmented, indistinct discussions of past events, that even with depicted flashbacks become clear only very piecemeal, and with very deliberate, irregular pacing. At all times the writing takes the longest and most winding road to weave its tale of fleeting romance and recollection, all but proverbially doubling back and glancing behind to ensure that no one is following it except by the beacons that it lays down itself. Characters, story threads, dialogue, and any bigger or more overarching ideas are treated like a book that only this film can read, with pages that only this film can turn, as it pleases. And for all that, still I'm not entirely sure how coherent or complete it is, or therefore how meaningfully cohesive and cohesively meaningful it is. 'Hiroshima mon amour' is a picture that will be right up the alley of anyone who likes art films. If it's a straightforward drama you're anticipating or otherwise seeking, maybe you should keep looking.

Chief stars Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada are fantastic. Alain Resnais' direction, and the cinematography of Sacha Vierny and Michio Takahashi, are lovely. I admire the sheer daring of Renais, and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, to make a feature that goes against almost all convention of (cinematic) storytelling. I wonder, however, if the end result doesn't lean too hard into that thrust, clouding if not outright losing sight of the actual storytelling in the process. As if to accentuate the point, He is little more than a sounding board for Her, and perhaps it speaks to my expectations more than anything else, but the feature seems imbalanced as it becomes almost exclusively all about Her without any palpable development of His character. I wonder if this marked an intentional effort to turn away any viewers who couldn't engage with the title at its most abstruse level, or if there was just no thought put toward viewership at all. Obviously 'Hiroshima mon amour' has enjoyed high acclaim since its release, and I can understand why; the artistic bent here is undeniable, and there are plentiful juicy notions herein. The question is one of weighing the value of the feature's content, and the pure fancifulness with which it's laid before us, against the challenge (and subjective vexation) of that obfuscation. It's a question of personal preference, and while I like this, and its convoluted exploration of love, impermanence, constancy, memory, and so on - well, I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't have preferred a film that didn't try so hard to reach for lofty pretensions. Sometimes less is more, and I feel like Resnais and Duras could have practiced a tinge more self-restraint, opening the movie to wider audiences, without truly impacting the integrity of their vision.

I'll watch almost anything, no matter the genre or expected quality; some titles I love, others I hate, others I'm just indifferent to. I suppose 'Hiroshima mon amour' is a title I altogether don't "get." I don't think there's any shame in that; I'm glad for those who appreciate it still more, and derive more satisfaction and fulfillment from it. I want to like this more than I do; maybe a second viewing would reveal something to me that I've missed out on the first time. I think it's worth checking out - with the caveat that one rather needs to be especially attuned to the same very particular wavelength to really draw the most from it. Take a look, by all means, but just first consider what exactly it is you want out of your movie experiences.

I'm honestly puzzled at what people find good in this film. I haven't read a single positive review that actually says anything other than "groundbreaking", "a watershed" and other overworked clichés. I would really like someone to tell me what, precisely, they think is so good about it. Maybe I'm missing something, or am just not interested in whatever-it-is.

I can't even see that it was exciting in 1959.

The biggest thing wrong with it is this: the characters are two-dimensional. You get no real sense of them as people. Even their nominal professions (he an architect, she an actor) get no depth. The scenes where she's supposedly on the 'set' of her 'movie' were laughable. In short, I didn't care about what happened to them. As it turns out, more-or-less nothing does.

One thing that was totally true-to-life was their interminable "let's have one more night"/"let's never see each other again"/"let's be together forever" to-ing and fro-ing over their third or fourth or fifteenth beer. Yes, just as tedious and shallow as the real thing: playing this Saturday night at any convenient bar in your town.

I can't recall a movie I've enjoyed less.

I kept waiting for something - anything - to happen. It didn't. All we get is a few more flashbacks to the sketchy 'what I did during the war' back-story. Everything is superficial. None of it was interesting or insightful.

The friends I saw it with (at a screening at the NSW Art Gallery) all agreed. We've worked out a code to escape in the future. If you're giving this movie a try, I recommend you do the same and spare yourself the tedium.