Hiroshima Mon Amour January 29, 2006

Alain Resnais' first feature has a certain melancholy beauty and a script that haunts long after you've left the cinema. The narrative is not at all straightforward but this is what attracts the fans of scriptwriter Marguerite Duras. A love affair between a French actress on location for an antiwar film in Hiroshima and a Japanese architect revives painful memories of the war for both of them. His trauma is obvious from the title -- Hiroshima immediately evokes the agony of the world's collective memory of the end of WWII. Flashbacks show how the man's life has been shattered by what happened at Hiroshima. It's not in the title and it's nowhere near as agonisingly famous, but the tragedy in the woman's past took place in a town in Burgundy called Nevers. Again, flashbacks reveal how she was punished after the war for having an affair with a German soldier. Nevers mon amour just would not have made a great title in 1959 or even now, for are the wounds of the French Occupation as universally symbolic of human suffering as Hiroshima? It's definitely a better source of drama -- and this is after all a film with a storyline and characters, not a history lesson. This is a seriously art house film: it's French, it's Resnais and Duras, and it's difficult to follow as it's forever switching between scenes from the present and flashbacks. Love it or hate it but only judge after seeing it on the big screen.
NB: for Alain Resnais fans catch Nuit et brouillard on Wed 25/01 (6:30pm) also at the Cine Lumiere.

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