About time I watched another classic of world cinema! In fact, Alain Resnais’ feature directing debut Hiroshima Mon Amour is considered one of the first landmark films of the French New Wave. Written by acclaimed French novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras, it is a lovely movie set in the ruins of a great tragedy over a period of about thirty-six hours. Emmanuelle Riva is a French actress shooting a film in Hiroshima. Eiji Okada is a Japanese architect whom she met and is having an affair with. As her time in the country is coming to an end, the two contrive to spend more time together as they converse around the city, share memories, and interrogate their feelings.
I can see a lot of other movies in Hiroshima Mon Amour, most notably Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise -likewise a conversational film about a short affair in a foreign city; but also In the Mood for Love, Lost in Translation, even Wings of Desire. Whether in the concept, the style, the ambiguity and vagueness (the characters’ only identified names are Elle and Lui -literally “Her” and “Him”), or the structure, there’s plenty to draw from in this film that was generally not like much else in cinema at the time. Already, you can see the impetus in Resnais to go out of his way to break the rules of cinema, as he would two years later in Last Year in Marienbad. On this film he has restraint, the world and the characters and their motivations are much clearer, but the seeds of that later film are very apparent in a number of creative choices.
Large parts of the first act of the movie in particular are shot and framed almost like the documentaries that Resnais made his name on. Long sequences where the two protagonists merely observe peace demonstrations or photographic relics of the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Death and destruction still permeates the environment fourteen years after the fact, and the war still occupies the forefronts of the characters’ minds. Most of the second act takes place in a tea room as the man prompts the woman into revealing some of her history. In flashback we see that as a girl during the war she fell for a German soldier in Nevers, France, and the subsequent shaming by her community and her personal devastation after his death has traumatized her ever since. She relates the story in the second person, addressing the man as though he were the German, and it’s a beautifully written and performed sequence. It becomes clear the movie is really about her guardedness and her struggle to move past the earlier heartbreak to embrace her feelings for this Japanese man, who himself can’t seem to leave her.
And as much as he becomes a borderline stalker by the end, the romance is very touching and tender. The love scenes (or post-coital) scenes between them are wonderful, Riva especially playing them with such longing in her eyes that betrays her true emotions. Perhaps the most famous image from the film is the close-up of the two lovers’ naked bodies entwined, variations of which are cut to throughout the movie. And remembering that this came out in 1959, the fact the love story is so sincere and that these shots are articulated with such beauty and delicateness, all for an interracial couple, its’ very warming. The first instance of this image though, which the film opens on, seems to have them coated in dust in an eerie evocation of the horror of the Hiroshima devastation. Their affair is never far removed from it, her experiences directly compared to it at times. Hiroshima Mon Amour wants you to remember what happened there, but to learn from it; to understand the gravity of horrible memories but also to know that something wonderful and freeing awaits on the other side.
Criterion Recommendation: Rafiki (2018)
It’s just been added to the Criterion Channel, so why not add it to the Collection itself. Wanuri Kahiu’s vibrant and mesmerizing lesbian youth drama is both a stirring indictment of the appalling state of LGBTQ rights in Kenya and an exuberant love story earnestly celebrating non-heteronormativity. Stylish and visually striking, with sequences of moody lighting and evocative pastel colour grading, it’s a movie with such admirable boldness and earnest conviction that it is destined to become a gem of its genre. Its’ stars, Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva are amazing at bringing to life this sweet relationship -Mugatsia especially deserving of accolades and a long career if there’s any justice in this world. And with Kahiu’s star as a filmmaker on the rise, it’s the ample time for Criterion to get ahead of the game and grant her first big international hit a place among the greats of modern world cinema.
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