Review of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) by Andy A — 25 Nov 2009

A few cultural missteps aside, Alain Renais' drowsy thought piece set in the midst of a 1950s Japan is an almost perfect psychological flashback---- both to the origins of the French New Wave and to a time when scars were still fresh in a world recovering from war.

And what better way to express that sense of impossible loss than through the medium of a doomed romance? By using the story of an affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect, Renais makes the act of forgetting the horrors of war and love lost a kind of therapeutic, if not futile, gesture altogether.

Among smoky cocktail lounges and neon marquees, there is a sense of emotional desperation that parts ever so slightly, like that first gulp of air following a panic attack, revealing something very human at its core.

If you're looking to gauge the atmosphere and theme, the best place to get an idea can be found an earlier Renais work: the 1955 documentary "Night and Fog", which similarly juxtaposes flowery incantations with visually disturbing fragments of the Holocaust in Europe.

But rather than showing us mountains of extracted gold fillings or vine-encrusted torture chambers we open with the terrifying symbol of the Genbaku Dome, standing alone in a flattened atomic wasteland.

Though the experience is a far more diluted (but no less enthralling) examination of emotional reconciliation, and I still can't bring myself to agree with its chosen ending (since it could have done so on a number of earlier, more succinct occasions), the movie feels right nonetheless.

If you dig tragic love, period pieces or heavily psychological films then you should take the time to make time for Renais. There's little to do with Hiroshima per se, but the ultimate pay-off is something which can best be compared to one of those night-long conversations you have with a trusted friend, where everything is laid bare and the truth of things can be made clear.

Even if only for a moment.