Hiroshima mon amour

An extended prologue shows a man and a woman embracing each other amidst falling ash. A female voice recounts seeing the devastation caused by the Hiroshima bomb on August 6, 1945 while a male voice refutes her claims, saying she saw nothing. They continue to disagree with each other as news footage of the attack is intercut with footage of the victims, new war memorials, and buildings in Hiroshima.

Elle stands on a hotel balcony in Hiroshima, overlooking the city. She comes back inside to see her lover, Lui, naked and asleep on the bed. He wakes up, and the two begin their day. Elle goes to work on the film set of an anti-war film while Lui goes to a World War II museum before visiting the set. Throughout the film, the two converse about memory and forgetfulness as Elle prepares to return to France, putting an end to their brief relationship.

That evening, Elle and Lui go to a restaurant and discuss their murky pasts. Elle grew up in the French town of Nevers under German occupation during the war. She fell in love with a young German soldier and the two made plans to elope, only for him to be shot and killed on the day of Nevers's liberation by the Allies. Traumatized, Elle was publicly ostracized for her relationship with the soldier and imprisoned in the basement of her parents' home. Her health eventually recuperated to the point where she could travel, and she arrived in Paris on the day of the Hiroshima bombing. Lui, a Hiroshima native, was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army during the war but was away on duty when the bomb dropped and wiped out his family. He returned to Hiroshima after the war and became an architect, during which time he also married.

The pair continue to compare their past relationships with the bombing of Hiroshima and the perspectives of anonymity shared by the people inside and outside the incident. Eventually, Lui asks Elle to stay with him but she turns him down as she has family in France and he has a wife. Reaching the conclusion that her love for Lui is doomed to fail, similar to her love for the German soldier, Elle goes back to the hotel and Lui follows. She lashes out at him, claiming that she is already starting to forget who he is. Exasperated, she begins calling him "Hiroshima"; Lui affirms that he is Hiroshima and that she is "Nevers."

• Emmanuelle Riva as Elle
• Eiji Okada as Lui
• Bernard Fresson as L'Allemand
• Stella Dassas as La Mère
• Pierre Barbaud as Le Père

According to James Monaco, Resnais was originally commissioned to make a short documentary about the atomic bomb, but spent several months confused about how to proceed because he did not want to recreate his 1956 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. He later went to his producer and joked that the film could not be done unless Marguerite Duras was involved in writing the screenplay.[2]

The film was a co-production by companies from both Japan and France. The producers stipulated that one main character must be French and the other Japanese, and also required that the film be shot in both countries employing film crews comprising technicians from each.[2]

Hiroshima mon amour earned an Oscar nomination for screenwriter Marguerite Duras as well as the Fipresci International Critics' Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival,[3] where the film was excluded from the official selection because of its sensitive subject matter of nuclear bombs as well as to avoid upsetting the U.S. government.[4] It won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association in 1960.[5] In 2002, it was voted by the international contributors of the French film magazine Positif to be one of the top 10 films since 1952, the first issue of the magazine.

Hiroshima mon amour has been described as "The Birth of a Nation of the French New Wave" by American critic Leonard Maltin.[6] New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard described the film's inventiveness as "Faulkner plus Stravinsky" and celebrated its originality, calling it "the first film without any cinematic references".[7] Filmmaker Eric Rohmer said, "I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema".[8]

Among the film's innovations is Resnais' experiments with very brief flashback sequences intercut into scenes to suggest the idea of a brief flash of memory. Resnais later used similar effects in The War Is Over and Last Year at Marienbad.

It was shown as part of the Cannes Classics section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival,[9] as well as having nine screenings at the Harvard Film Archive between 28 November and 13 December 2014.[10]

In his book on Resnais, James Monaco ends his chapter on Hiroshima mon amour by claiming that the film contains a reference to the classic 1942 film Casablanca:

Here is an 'impossible' love story between two people struggling with the imagery of a distant war. At the end of this romantic, poignant movie about leave takings and responsibilities, the two fateful lovers meet in a cafe. Resnais gives us a rare establishing shot of the location. 'He' is going to meet 'She' for the last time at a bar called 'The Casablanca' - right here in the middle of Hiroshima! It's still the same old story. A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers. As time goes by.[2]

In Japan Journals: 1947-2004, film historian Donald Richie tells in an entry for 25 January 1960 of seeing the film in Tokyo and remarks on various distracting (for the Japanese) cultural errors which Resnais made. He notes, for example, that the Japanese-language arrival and departure time announcements in the train scenes bear no relation to the time of day in which the scenes are set. Also, people pass through noren curtains into shops which are supposedly closed. The noren is a traditional sign that a shop is open for business and is invariably taken down at closing time.[11]

• List of avant-garde films of the 1950s

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hiroshima mon amour.

• Hiroshima mon amour at IMDb
• Hiroshima mon amour at AllMovie
• Hiroshima mon amour at Rotten Tomatoes
• Hiroshima mon amour at the TCM Movie Database
• Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite an essay by Kent Jones at the Criterion Collection