Hiroshima Mon Amour (The Criterion Collection)
by Alain Resnais
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bernard Fresson, Eiji Okada, Emmanuelle Riva, Pierre Barbaud, Stella DassasDirector: Alain Resnais
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-06-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Hiroshima Mon Amour (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Hands down, one of the most important films of the second half of the 20th century
Summary: 5 Stars
From the opening sequence of a lovers' embrace shot in extreme close-up, intercut with footage of atomic bomb survivors, Alain Resnais creates an asynchronous narrative rhythm in Hiroshima mon amour. A Parisian actress (Emmanuelle Riva) filming an antiwar public service announcement in Hiroshima, has a brief, passionate affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). A vague dialogue between the two nameless lovers provides a glimpse into the loss and regret of their mutually suppressed, unspoken pasts: the actress recounts unsettling images of bomb casualties, as the architect refutes her testament, insisting that she cannot know Hiroshima. After parting to their separate ways for the day, the architect later visits the actress on location, and convinces her to have a drink with him. He is drawn to her melancholy, and seeks validation for their encounter - an intangible souvenir that transcends their short-lived, impossible relationship - an emotional connection. She tells him that Nevers is the home of her youth, a place that she no longer visits, and gradually begins to reveal the events surrounding the loss of her true love, a German soldier, during the final days of occupied France. They are kindred spirits, bound together by personal shame and guilt of survival, and an overwhelming sense that they can never go home again (as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's White. It is through their affair that the memory of her beloved is reawakened. In essence, the architect is the catalyst: the receptive soul who guides her through the painful, introspective path that leads to closure.
Alain Resnais retains the radical narrative structure of Marguerite Duras' screenplay, yet achieves a distinctly personal tome on war, guilt, and atonement in Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais' incorporation of unstructured, elliptical chronology creates a sense of atemporality and perpetuity. The lovers emerge after their tryst from a hotel named New Hiroshima, reinforcing the theme of irretrievable history: figuratively, the lost, old Hiroshima that the actress has never (and cannot) known. The repeated dialogue, documentary footage of victims, antiwar protest banners, and flashbacks of Nevers, provide a seamless fusion of the past coexisting with the present. Moreover, the actress' tangential narrative, recounting her nervous breakdown, and her interchanged references to the Japanese architect as her lost German lover, further dissolve the visual linearity of the flashback sequence. This results in a film that is chronologically obscure, a reflection of the toll of personal memories - of how the past subtly, but invariably, affects us - and forever alters our behavior. Hiroshima mon amour is a highly stylized, tightly interwoven tale of lost love, a uniquely realized story of collective conscience: of regret and survival, loss and reconstruction...of nations and people.
Summary of Hiroshima Mon Amour (The Criterion Collection)
A cornerstone of French cinema, Alain Resnais' first feature is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. Utilizing an innovative flashback structure and an Academy AwardŽ-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Resnais delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish, in this moody masterwork.An extraordinary and deeply moving film that retains much of its power since its original release in 1959, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the story of a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) who become lovers in the city of Hiroshima, where the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb to end World War II in the Pacific. Written by Marguerite Duras and juggled, as if by wandering thoughts, in chronology and setting by Resnais, the film reveals the miserable and mortifying experiences of each character during the war and suggests the obvious healing properties of their relationship in the present. An emotional allusion or two can certainly be made with the more recent The English Patient, but nothing can quite prepare one for Resnais's extreme yet intuitively accessible experiments in fusing the past, present, and future into great sweeps of subjectively experienced memory. Yet audiences have never had trouble relating to this bold milestone of the French New Wave, largely because at its heart is a genuinely affecting, soulful love story. --Tom Keogh
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