The debut feature from Alain Resnais picks up with a comparable tone and style to his well-circulated and effective short Night and Fog. The opening fifteen minutes of Hiroshima mon amour has, among its scenic imagery and a dramatically photographed couple in arms, archival footage of Hiroshima after the bombing attacks in WWII, as well as similar footage of the aftermath extracted from feature films. The audio during this montage is a back and forth dialogue/poetry spoken by the film’s leads, French actress Elle and the married, Japanese Lui. The dialogue, which reminded me quite a bit of the voiceover poetry spoken in Terrence Malick’s recent work, seems too bizarre to be an actual conversation between the two, although it is responsive. The female voice states certain things which appear to be facts, such as that she visited a hospital, or she went four times to the museum dedicated to the Hiroshima bombing, affirming herself that she knows the suffering that the residents of Hiroshima have suffered. A male voice retorts, “you know nothing of Hiroshima.” This voice is stern and authoritative, belittling the woman’s naive delusions of the knowledge of suffering. But, of course, the suffering she speaks of is only symbolic. The woman, who turns out to be Elle, lost the love of her life when she was younger, and draws parallels between the lovesickness and heartbreak that she experienced to the mass death, 10,000 degrees of heat, and subsequent physical deformity which struck Hiroshima. The film isn’t focused on this dichotomy of love and physical suffering; to make such a comparison with the still fresh tragedy of Hiroshima would have been irresponsible, insensitive, and embarrassingly inaccurate. The film is, instead, interested in the importance of the memory/forgetting of these things; a woman’s lost love, and a nation’s lost everything.
After this bravura opening fifteen minutes, the other major event of the film involves Elle telling Lui about her past love. The film’s logic and sense of time becomes shaky at this point, supposedly to mirror the mental trauma of living with the memory, and task of forgetting such a circumstance. In her recollections, Elle refers to Lui as dead. I suppose to not know someone in the past is similar to not knowing them in the future; if you’re not here with me, then why should you exist at all? Solipsistic, eh? The film’s most satisfying moment occurs when Elle is on the verge of complete hysteria and Lui does what we all want to do, and gives her a good smack.
The film often reminded me of some of Antonioni’s films, especially L’Eclisse. The photography of the architecture, pacing, and music in the closing minutes of that film were, in general, pretty evocative of Hiroshima, and I thought that the elliptical finales of both films suggest a deeply disturbed psychological displacement of the characters, and an attempt at accomplishing that effect in the viewer. While the last bits of dialogue between Elle and Lui could be the ultimate no-no in giving the audience too much information, saying out loud the subtlety and symbolism laid down in the rest of the film, it somehow bypasses this and closes in the moment that it is its most enigmatic.