Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Movie rating: 10/10
A film about love and war, memory and trauma, Hiroshima Mon Amour covers a lot of thematic ground. Directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, the film is hailed as a major influence on the French New Wave, which was characterized by experimentation, realism, and narrative ambiguity. Its plot concerns the love affair between an unnamed French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada), in postwar Hiroshima. The two have many conversations about the war, their lives, and their relationship to each other.
The first 15 minutes or so are made up largely of documentary footage from after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The gruesome injuries, agony and deformities inflicted upon the people of the city are horrifying to witness. The woman recalls her experience at the museum in Hiroshima, full of photographs and reconstructions “for lack of anything else.” Over footage of Japanese protesting nuclear weapons, she reflects on who the protesters directed their anger at:
They were angered whether they knew it or not by the fundamental inequality imposed by some nations on others, by the fundamental inequality imposed by some races on others, by the fundamental inequality imposed by some classes on others.
When the man asks her what the bombing of Hiroshima meant in France, she says amazement, then “an unknown fear”, then indifference, then fear of that indifference. The spectre of nuclear war, as one might expect from the title, hangs over the whole film. The woman is convinced that this horror will happen again. After having the effects of nuclear war seared into our minds by the opening, it seems unthinkable that we could forget what that prospect would mean. And yet history seems to vindicate the woman’s fears.
To be sure, no one has used nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But consider that in 1959 when the film came out, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had set their Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight. In 2022, it is 100 minutes to midnight. As war fever against Russia grips Western ruling classes, atomic scientists believe the threat of nuclear war is actually closer than it was at any time during the (First) Cold War.
Throughout the film, parallels are drawn between how we remember love and war, and how we forget both of them as well. “Just as in love,” the woman says, “there is this illusion, this illusion that you will never be able to forget, the way I had the illusion, faced with Hiroshima, that I would never forget.” As the story unfolds, we learn about this woman’s past, her experience of love and loss, and how she is driven to push love away for fear of renewed heartbreak.
The third act is marked by the characters’ indecisiveness, whether the woman should stay in Hiroshima, whether they should continue seeing each other. “Sometimes it's important to ignore the difficulties this world presents,” she says. “Otherwise, it would become unbearable.” While the ending is ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways, to me it suggested that difficulties are inevitable in life and we must learn to bear them.
My first impression of Hiroshima Mon Amour was how bold it was for a film made in 1959 compared to Hollywood offerings at the time. Where U.S. films and television shows at this time suggested that married couples didn’t even sleep in the same bed together, this film actually acknowledges that people have sex. Furthermore, the relationship depicted is between 1) a white woman and an Asian man, who 2) also claim to be happily married to other people. Both would have sent the Eisenhower-era MPAA into convulsions.
More important is the movie’s frank portrayal of what the atomic bombing meant for the people of Hiroshima. To this day, it is still a mainstream belief that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was justified. In fact the Japanese were on the brink of surrender. A U.S. study commissioned in 1946, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, concluded after interviewing Japanese military and civilian leaders that the use of atomic bombs were unnecessary to win the war:
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated”.
The truth was that the U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons was a means of intimidation against the Soviet Union, with the aim of halting the Soviet advance into the Far East and asserting U.S. imperialist interests in the region. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atrocities and war crimes, but you rarely hear them described as such in Western media or the education system. One of the themes of Hiroshima Mon Amour is what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, both in love and war. The victors of any war are anxious to hide their own crimes, and as always, the winners write the history books.
Spoilers follow.
The wartime past of Emmanuelle Riva’s character in the film highlights how we choose to remember history. Gradually, she reveals the truth of her abiding love for a young German soldier, whom she had planned to marry in Bavaria. On the day her village of Nevers was liberated, a sniper killed the German. Like other French women accused of being in relationships with German soldiers, she was publicly humiliated, her long hair shorn off before she was ostracized and hidden in a cellar.
France’s disproportionate focus at the end of World War II on ordinary women among those who had collaborated with the Germans drew attention from those much more powerful and guilty of far greater crimes. It directed public anger away from business interests who had grown wealthy by making deals with the Germans, from right-wing and fascist elements who had participated in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and so on. In his definitive study France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944, historian Julian Jackson summed up the situation well: “Sexual contacts between French women and German soldiers were numerous, but the post-war fixation upon them is largely revealing of male sexual anxieties and jealousies.”
Hiroshima Mon Amour is a thoughtful film. I admired the film for its daring and profundity in approaching these various themes. Clearly it struck a nerve at the time, being excluded from the official selection at 1959 Cannes Film Festival due to its subject matter involving nuclear weapons and to avoid upsetting the U.S. government. The truth hurts, especially where crimes against humanity are concerned.
Riva and Okada are both attractive leads who deliver excellent performances. Their romance feels genuine. The complexity of emotions at play makes for an engaging experience. The atmosphere and sound design is moody and naturalistic, the screen full of beautiful location shots from France and Japan. The editing incorporates brief flashbacks that visualize how memories can be fragmented, passing in and out of our thoughts.
A final note on how I watched the film. For a while I’ve subscribed to three streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+), yet I often find myself endlessly scrolling and never finding a movie that interests me. Tonight I decided to get a free trial of the Criterion Channel and this was the first film I watched on it. For me it was a breath of fresh air to see a movie that offered a different perspective and different filmmaking technique from most Hollywood fare, and which is not afraid to push boundaries. For a movie made more than 60 years ago to feel this fresh and relevant is a testament to the state of the world we live in, but also to the talent and vision of those who created this film.