Hiroshima Mon Amour - Criterion Collection

Starring:Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernard Fresson
Director: Alain Resnais
Studio: Criterion
Product Type: DVD

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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

Description

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 Award®-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Resnais delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish, in this moody masterwork.

Customer Reviews:

Hiroshima Mon Amour.......2007-06-26

Alain Resnais's widely acknowledged masterpiece is a work of profound beauty. Beyond its sensitive presentation of a most unusual (and then, quite daring) love story, the film is one of the most visually striking black and white films ever made. Both Riva and Okada project vulnerabilities and emotions that feel achingly real, and we stand right beside them in their alternating bliss and torment. A mesmerizing, deeply affecting film.

Persistence of Memory.......2007-04-21

"Hiroshima mon amour" (1959) is an extraordinary tale of two people, a French actress and a Japanese architect - a survivor of the blast at Hiroshima. They meet in Hiroshima fifteen years after August 6, 1945 and become lovers when she came there to working on an antiwar film. They both are hunted by the memories of war and what it does to human's lives and souls. Together they re-live their tragic past and uncertain present in a complex series of fantasies and nightmares, flashes of memory and persistence of it. The black-and-white images by Sasha Vierney and Mikio Takhashi, especially the opening montage of bodies intertwined are unforgettable and the power of subject matter is undeniable. My only problem is the film's Oscar nominated screenplay. It works perfectly for the most of the film but then it begins to move in circles making the last 20 minutes or so go on forever.

4.5/5

MAJOR BIG DEAL CLASSIC--(action film fans don't even apply).......2007-02-22

So what makes a great classic film ? (there are few) Well, let's start with context. Here's one of the crown jewels of the French New Wave, that band of autuers who rose up in the late 50's to change the way the rest of us looked at film. And why? Hiroshima,mon amour is the grand-daddy of the time/memory gang --the films you so like to try to figure out today like Momento, or David Lynch, or the latest every-thing-is-upside-down-and backwards type of film. It's a film that got everyone excited. It's mix of past and present--war torn France and post-war Hiroshima--of regret and nostalghia, guilt, horror of the past, etc. simply had not seen the light of day before. Then there's the visual scheme--almost every shot in the film could stand as a fine photo by itself. (That spells c-l-a-s-s-i-c.) A script that's blatantly poetic-not a compromise in sight.
Add to that some admirably understated performances, a little nudity, and a profundo-unprecedented pace--
don't run, walk slowly. Brilliant intercutting, startling images. That all said, it's a classic that will probably
drive viewers used to "fast,plot driven films" batty. But if your interested in the history of film, open to a challenge, want to discover new ways of looking at film, then this work of art (it is defintely that) is something you might
find not only tolerable, but even inspiring.

An Antti Keisala Comment: A Nine-Film Retrospective About Love - Resnais.......2007-02-09

With WKW's "In The Mood For Love" I anticipated this comment a little.

I am like any other and really enjoy most films when they find soulmates from others, and watching them accordingly gives them richness that most likely was not intended by the film-maker. Of course, we tend to make up things that weren't intended by the film-maker, either. But that takes the fun out of it. These are also fun as retrospectives to watch during a holiday or weekend, and they also expose to some fine film-making. This retrospective and a commentary series deals with women, love and cinema, and has nine films, of which this is the first in chronological order. Of course, I am like any other who wishes to write something that's endlessly complicated and hard to understand. No worries, there, my friends: I write fiction. Ironic film-noir, where even the writer doesn't know what's going on.

So. First, there is the preconception about French cinema and how it understands love, women and sex. Everybody knows how it is, and as such everybody knows how silly it really is. It isn't how the Spanish are creating a sexual narrative: everything, including the characters, creates an empty vessel to be filled up not with introspection that could reflect into our own souls but with matter that comes from cultural dynamics. When I think of French films in general I think of journalists. And that isn't a good thing.

What this means is that not after this nor before Amelié anything that the French made was cinematically beautiful, not their women nor their love, apart from Rohmer, because it doesn't mesh with their means. This is a comment that's too polemic to be taken without slight irony. I will most likely deny it in a timely fashion. At least the Sensual and truly hyper-intelligent Rohmer makes me wish I had steered away from ultimatums. And I will. But what is so amazing is that Resnais is truly the kind of an intellectual you might connect to the French New Wave, and this film might put off many just because of its seemingly avant-garde feel. And let me tell you, that to think this film as a new wave film is missing the point, much like much of the New Wave missed the point. This film is about itself, and making itself just as it is about making of itself, but not in the conventional means. Indeed, there is an actress and there is an architect, two very introspective and cinematic figures, yet just as 'Marienbad' goes deeper than any other French film in revealing the film's function in contrast to memory, the catalyst in this film is love, and it is war and fear that is used as a wrapper, not the self-referential material. I find the focus on the subject of love and sex as the true center of creating an abstraction sensually fluid, as if the film had a soul of its own. This film has a soul and heart of its own. Think of a love letter become conscious of itself, writing and reading itself.

These are groundbreaking ideas that the New Wave wished to tie into a reality. Resnais wished to go the way of dreams and reflections, and memory. And even if we care nothing about that, this really could be a profound experience. But to be interested in the subject... this is everything, everywhere. And it's love that is driving us into and out of the bomb.

The next step would be Mikio Naruse's 1960 film Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki, that is, 'When a Woman Ascends the Stairs', not as layered a film as this, but it has fluid camera work, very much anticipating WKW, and yet it is something that differs from the most fluid 'Marienbad'.

With best regards,
AK

Audacious in subject matter as well as style..........2007-01-02

Alain Resnais does not neglect the blast of Hiroshima by wrapping it with a simple love-affair...

His film is puzzling, but, at the same time, a compromise, a promise, a pledge to human society... It is too daring by its conventional moral standards, distinguished in the way it was done, written, made and executed...

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is about the fortitude of man, with its mental and physical power... Alain Resnais and his writer-collaborator Marguerite Duras combined a love story with an anti-bomb story... They carry out the horror of Hiroshima and the sorrow of a lost first love...

Hiroshima is a tragedy that shocks us, while the story of love in Nevers makes us cry...

The story of Nevers does not trivialize the story of Hiroshima... We gasp at the tragedy of Hiroshima as we weep over the tragedy at Nevers... We contemplate a cosmic and a personal problem at the same time.

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is a new kind of film... It has great technical ability, illustrating hypothesis plus fact...

There is a close-up of Emmanuelle Riva , who has just glanced at Eiji Okada, asleep... Suddenly there is a brief flash-cut of the body of a wounded young man lying in approximately the same position in another place...

Resnais' camera moves like a stream from the present to the past and back to the present... It cuts back to Riva's face, and then back to Okada asleep, and in that split second the technique of the subliminal flash cut, used to describe a character's state of mind, is born...

This cut is the key to the film, for it is the man whom she calls 'Hiroshima' who reminds her of her lover at Nevers...

It is the tragedy of his race that reminds her of the small tragedy of her life...

This identification is carried through in the most neurotic moments of her recitative, when she looks at the Japanese and speaks to him as if he were her German lover of fourteen years before...

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" reflects image and sound, past and present; the actual and the remembered; Hiroshima (a city of neon) and Nevers (a city of gray stone); the personal and the cosmic; a man and a woman; concern for the individual and concern for mankind...

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