She
is a French actress who has been shooting a so-called peace film in Hiroshima.
He is a Japanese architect, whose wife is usually out of town for extended
periods of time. They are both attracted and lonely, on a deeply profound
level, so things take their course. However, matters get rather complicated
during the afterglow of passion. Despite his apparent contempt for her
peacenikery, He has a hard time letting go. She is more inclined to make a
clean break, yet she is clearly conflicted. They are both haunted by the past,
but her ghosts are especially thorny, rooted in the morally ambiguous era of the
National Socialist occupation.
HMA was largely shot
in Japan, but it is one of the truly defining films of the French Nouvelle
Vague. The long opening sequence plays out like an avant-garde documentary,
contrasting newsreel-like images of Hiroshima survivors and the memorial museum
with the refrains of an apparent lovers’ quarrel, albeit a rather politicized
one: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima, nothing. I saw everything in Hiroshima,
everything.”
Eventually,
Resnais shows the lovers intertwined, generating eroticism, while also evoking
the images and textures of the tragically fused bodies of the Hiroshima atomic
blast area or Pompeii. Over fifty years later, HMA is still aesthetically bold, yet somehow Resnais’s radical
stylistic shifts are never jarring, rather feeling like they are part of a
cohesive whole. It also has a powerful sense of place. By the time it ends, viewers
will feel they know Her severely appointed modernist hotel better than their
own apartments.
As
the lovers rouse themselves, HMA almost
segues into film noir, following their impossible courtship through a series of
late night bars and deserted streets. It all looks eerily beautiful thanks to Michio
Takahashi’s arresting black-and-white cinematography. Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji
Okada also look like they were chiseled out of Roman statuary marble expressly
for this film. They develop some scorching hot chemistry, but also dramatically
convey the persistent pain they continue to bear inside. Indeed, HMA is a brutally realistic depiction of
the push-me-pull-me dynamic. He and She are trying to use each other to forget,
but they perversely spur each other to remember with uncomfortable clarity.
Arguably,
you could not make HMA as is, in this
day and age. Even though Hiroshima is still acceptable fodder for an
anti-nuclear message, the concerted efforts to woe the gatekeepers responsible
for Chinese film import quotas would probably demand equal time for Japanese atrocities
in Nanjing. Honestly, there are only so many guilt trips one can take in a
single film. Fortunately, there are many ways to relate to HMA beyond its anti-nuclear raison d’être. In fact, it is one of
the great ships-passing-in-the-night films of all time. Highly recommended for
patrons of French and Japanese cinema, the newly restored Hiroshima Mon Amour screens tomorrow (10/10) at the Walter Reade,
as part of this year’s NYFF, with a proper theatrical release to commence next
Friday (10/17) at Film Forum downtown and the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center
uptown.
