Review of Hiroshima mon Amour / 二十四時間の情事, directed by Alain Resnais

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Because of the lack of money coming my way, I had to be picky about the kinds of subscriptions and services I was getting ahold of during this time, and I used my local library a lot. I am so incredibly privileged and blessed to be living in a city where we have a decent enough library system where I can get the books I want, when I want, and not have to worry about access to movies because of their DVD collection and how they have Kanopy.

Every month they give us about twenty or so movies you can watch (called tickets; each movie is worth two or four tickets) on Kanopy for free, and I usually use about half of my allotted tickets before the month ends and it resets. I’ve been going down my five-year-old watch list, and today I landed on Hiroshima mon amour.

I’ve been meaning to watch this for years but am only getting to it just now, which is a tragedy because this movie fits me so well. Let’s get into the review before this introduction gets too long!

A French actress and a Japanese architect spend a passionate, poetic day together.

This is a movie that really needs to be experienced, not just read about, because while I can write about what happens in it, there’s a lot that could never translate to the written word. A lot of what happens on-screen is accompanied by a voiceover, which is how we get the initial setup for this film as well.

We see at first a man and a woman embracing each other among a sea of falling ash, and then the French actress recalls what happened in Hiroshima and how people were struggling after the bombings happened. All of this is accompanied by the memorials, footage (which I doubt was real in some of the clips), and how Hiroshima was redeveloped slowly. She has come into town to film a movie that is anti-war, which is why Hiroshima was chosen.

The male architect tells us the woman does not know what happened here in Hiroshima personally, and she is someone who could forget about everything she saw, unlike him. His entire family died while the city was bombed, and he only survived because he was drafted in the war and lived to continue remembering what had once happened here.

The man and woman sleep together, and the next morning she watches him as he sleeps, as he reminds her of her former lover who died in war. When he wakes up, they share more about their lives, including how he is an architect, and the topic of what happened during the war comes up. She tells him she never wants to go to her hometown (aptly named Nevers), but he tells her he wants to see her again despite her flight to Paris being the next day.

She is torn about this, but insists that they cannot meet again. When she goes out to film scenes, he goes to the filming location and she seems happy to see him there. He brings her home, and we learn he has a wife when the woman asks about him being alone. She tells him she’s married too and the subject of whether they’re happy comes up; they say they’re happy and have sex with each other again.

Afterwards, they go to a tea room and he asks for more details of her life. She tells him how she fell in love with a German soldier, and she was at his bedside as he slowly succumbed to his wounds. The village she lived in ostracized her because of the relationship, and her parents sent her to Paris right before Hiroshima was bombed by the Americans. The woman in the present day insists that she is over her love of the German man, and that she doesn’t want to get close to this Japanese man because of the devastation she feels about losing someone she has loved before.

As they leave the tea room, the man has hope, but the woman tells him they will never see each other again. As she lays in her hotel room, she thinks about this and makes a decision to stay in Hiroshima. She goes back to the tea room and searches for the man, and when they find each other, he asks her to stay with him. She agrees but then backtracks, demanding he go away.

They start walking around the city, eventually separating, and when she makes it to the train station, she decides to let go of the past. She ends up at a nightclub, the man following her from a distance, and he watches over her as she sits alone in the club. A different man hits on the woman, and eventually she heads back to her hotel.

The man comes to find her there, and she claims she is forgetting him. Suddenly, she stops and tells him his name is Hiroshima. He then tells her that her name is Nevers, giving a sense of hope for these two beyond the world of the movie and when it cuts to black.

Overall Thoughts

The premise of this movie is so simple, and when I was going into it I was skeptical about all of the hype I’ve heard about the film online. I was so shocked at how much I enjoyed watching this—it feels like visual poetry on the screen and I could tell the screenplay was written by a writer.

I was then shocked later to see that it was Duras who wrote it, which made so much sense in the end. The screenplay on this is so tight, and while we don’t know much more of these characters beyond what’s depicted on the screen, it’s enough. It’s such a satisfying experience that we don’t need more of this world, even with the open ending.

It’s also a movie about people touched by war and trauma in the end, which is why I found it so impactful. I wanted to root for these two and their happiness, considering everything that went down in their lives. I’m not going to play the trauma comparison game, as that’s such a losing battle, but it’s impossible to ignore how it shaped these characters and their trajectories.

Go watch this if you want a really good movie for a Saturday night in. Find a DVD copy, stream it, do whatever you usually do to get ahold of movies—I think this one if worth watching at least once in your lifetime!

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