Review of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) by Maierean I — 02 Jan 2015

I wish I liked this movie more. It's so deeply felt and filmed that I wish it wasn't such a drifting bore. It's not just the narrative, but the characters themselves.

How can a movie about a French women's affair with a Japanese man on the cusp of WW2 be so dull? They regard the war, each other, and even themselves with what seems like boredom. Maybe that's the point though? Or maybe the film was just lost on me. Like most of French New Wave though, the soundtrack is pretty much perfect. The passages where the score pulses underneath montages of Japan while the lovers talk back and forth in voiceover hit all the themes in such an effective way that it's a wonder that certain other scenes in the film exist.

For example, near the end the two are at some bar, sitting separately from each other. An older woman asks the Japanese man what's wrong. He then, in one chunk of uninterrupted dialogue, literally tells the old lady the film's whole plot until that point: they're lovers, but that they have to part, and that they're both sad about it. Literally that's it. The lady then says nothing and the movie moves on and no longer cares about her. Why does this scene exist at all? We learn nothing new. Whatever the characters were feeling gets neutered to the audience because of a chunk of expository dialogue.