{"id":16112,"date":"2015-07-14T13:02:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-14T17:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=16112"},"modified":"2015-07-14T13:02:50","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T17:02:50","slug":"alain-resnais-hiroshima-mon-amour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2015\/07\/14\/alain-resnais-hiroshima-mon-amour\/","title":{"rendered":"Alain Resnais: Hiroshima mon amour<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Review of The Criterion Collection Blu-ray edition.\r\n\r\nHiroshim mon amour\r\n<\/em><\/strong>d. Alain Resnais (1959)\r\nSpine: #196\r\nBlu-ray Release Date: July 14, 2015\r\n\r\nScreen captures below are taken from The Criterion Collection Blu-ray disc, but resolution has been reduced from 1920x1080 to 900x506 and slightly compressed. You may click on them to view the 900x506 image.<\/pre>\n
Following the success of\u00a0Night and Fog<\/em>,\u00a0the acclaimed\u00a0documentary on the\u00a0horrors of the Nazi concentration camps,\u00a0the director Alain Resnais was asked to\u00a0direct a short documentary about the atomic bomb,\u00a0meant to be\u00a0the first French-Japanese coproduction. Struggling with the idea (and recognizing that the Japanese had already created an important documentary on the subject), he finally told his producer, perhaps only joking, that he could only do\u00a0the film\u00a0if the script were by the experimental novelist\u00a0Marguerite Duras. And so the short documentary about the atomic bomb evolved and became the\u00a0masterful, beautiful, and supremely\u00a0enigmatic 90-minute film — deliberately created in two tenses — about tragedy and memory and the brittle nature of time, Hiroshima mon amour<\/em>, which is out today in a lovely Blu-ray edition from The Criterion Collection. Right now Barnes and Noble is running\u00a0a 50%-off sale on all Criterion titles. Of the most recent releases, many of which are superb, this is the one I’d most highly recommend.<\/p>\n
\"Hiroshima<\/p>\n
The first fifteen minutes of the film showcase the talents of both Resnais and Duras. The visuals (other than the initial image which I’ll return to in a moment) suggest a mini-documentary about the tragic results of the atomic bomb. We see footage of victims, with various deformities or burn scars or missing limbs. We see a museum that tries to commemorate the horrors with jars of human skin. We see children\u00a0born a decade after the tragedy\u00a0visiting these museums,\u00a0seeing the footage, and we wonder just how such an immense horror from a past that both is and is not theirs is entering their consciousness.<\/p>\n
\"Hiroshima<\/a><\/p>\n
Meanwhile, on top of the image, we get a strange dialogue between a man and a woman. Sometimes the dialogue lines up with the images on the screen — such as when the woman says she remembers going to the hospital in Hiroshima and we see dreamy shots of hospital corridors\u00a0— but most of the time it does not. Most of the time the man tells the woman she was not there, does not remember what she says. These are the two people we first see when the film lights up, in that initial image I mentioned above, only their presence on the screen is limited to two torsos, locked in a passionate embrace and covered, it seems, by fine\u00a0ash. Indeed, though they move, they\u00a0bring to mind the physical state and\u00a0emotional poses of\u00a0bodies recovered from ancient tragedies, like the explosion of Pompeii. The ash on their bodies is so\u00a0fine it looks\u00a0more like the bodies are made of ash rather than covered in ash. The scene progresses, and the ash becomes damp, more muddy, until\u00a0it\u00a0finally dissolves and we get two uncovered, physically beautiful, bodies in embrace. Their skin is naked and sensitive and completely present, unlike the skin we see missing from the bodies of the victims or preserved in the bottles in the museum.<\/p>\n
Over the course of this fifteen minute prologue, the woman tells the man that he’s destroying her, that he’s good for her. Duras revels in such seemingly contradictions, though the contradiction is, of course, nothing of the sort. This is a film about many things, but particularly it is about\u00a0making raw, about\u00a0removing the caky dust that\u00a0— in our relationships, yes, but mostly in ourselves —\u00a0prevent us from feeling, from remembering, and from, in a way, living.<\/p>\n
The woman\u00a0(neither the man nor the woman is named) is played by the beautiful Emmanuelle Riva, in her debut (she is the remarkable actress who in 2013, at age 86, was nominated for the Academy Award for her role in Michael Haneke’s Amour<\/em>). The man is played by Eiji Okado, whom I’ve only seen otherwise in the crazy Japanese science fiction flick, The X from Outer Space<\/em>.<\/p>\n
“She” (as she is credited) is a French actress working in Hiroshima on a film about peace. “He” is a Japanese architect who lives in the country but who works in Hiroshima. They met probably only a night or two ago, and they’re both taking advantage of the short time they have to engage in a whirlwind fling, though both are married, not unhappily. She’s going back to France the next day. She has no interest in delaying her departure, though he seems to feel there’s something deeper going on.<\/p>\n
\"Hiroshima<\/a><\/p>\n
Interestingly, this film that began its production life as a documentary about the atomic bomb is focused on Emmanuelle Riva’s French woman. Riva is the star, and — quick aside — even\u00a0in this debut role\u00a0it is rather easy to see why so many of the greatest directors have wanted to work with her across the decades. This film is experimental and conceptual on so many levels it seems impossible it could have worked without Riva’s strong performance, in which she covers a vast range of emotions and their repression. Okada does a fine job supporting and simultaneously pushing Riva’s character along her path of self-annihilation and rebirth.<\/p>\n
Her own past has a very personal, deeply felt tragedy that brings to mind the war-time fate of Arletty, the star of Marcel Carn\u00e9’s Children of Paradise<\/em>. This visit to Hiroshima and this affair with the Japanese man start to unsettle old, repressed memories.<\/p>\n
\"Hiroshima<\/a><\/p>\n
Her past jumps to us in quick cuts, as it must feel to her, unwelcome and even\u00a0almost unfamiliar in this new world. Though many prior films had utilized the flashback to great effect (indeed, I reviewed one, Robert Siodmak’s The Killers<\/em>, just last week), Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour<\/em> is notable for its deliberate attempt to show the past not as a flashback but as an intrusion on the present: “Marguerite Duras and I had this idea of working in two tenses. The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.” That quote is taken from the essay by Kent Jones that comes with the disc. When told by a producer that breaks with chronology were nothing new — the producer brought up Citizen Kane<\/em> — Resnais replied: “Yes, but in my film time is shattered.”<\/p>\n
And he’s right, and it works just the way I imagine he wanted it to.<\/p>\n
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Supplements:<\/strong><\/p>\n