Review of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) by Ryan M — 07 Feb 2010

Alain Resnais wanted to make a documentary on the survivors of the atom bomb at Hiroshima, and the first ten minutes of the film features various shocking images of disfigured faces, piles of rubble and desperation, but we hear a man and a woman talking over these images, various shots of holding hands suggests they are lovers, but who are they and why are they talking about a day where 100,000 people lost their lives?

He's a japanese architect and she's a french actress who's filming a movie about peace in Japan. They spend the night together despite her being married, as they go to bars and hotel rooms getting to know each other, but WW2 still remains fresh in their memory: His family were in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped and she fell in love with a German soldier and was made to pay by her parents and neighbours (he reminded her of the german soldier).

Ever since Christopher Nolan suggested it was cool to use flashbacks and flashforwards to tell a story everyone has been jumping on the obscure narrative bandwagon, but Alain Resnais uses each flashback as a burned image inside the subconscious of his two characters as they relate their experiences of WW2 to each other, whether direct (the japanese man was in the army) or indirect in the case of the woman. They may be two complete strangers who had never met until the previous night, they may have been thousands of miles apart until the previous night and they may have very little in common with each other, but World War 2 has left a huge impact on both of their lives and both can feel the other one's pain.

This film is a wakeup call: It asks us to be witness to the worst of what humanity can do, it shows us that we can all feel each other's pain from the other side of the world, it shows how war can change us without us ever knowing and it shows that we do look backwards to the past hoping to return to happier times. In essence the message is simple: Make love, not war.