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Remembering
to Not Forget "Hiroshima Mon Amour"
By
Kenneth Quan
Courtesy
of Amzaon.com |
Ashen
covered bodies amorously entangle and hold one another
as soot gradually trickles down like snow - the shapes
slowly turn into glittering figures. The ash on the
writhing limbs fades away and in its place is sweat
seething with passion. Abruptly a man's voice pronounces
"You saw nothing in Hiroshima - nothing."
A woman retorts defensively "I saw everything!"
This is the opening sequence to Alain Resnais' film
"Hiroshima mon amour." Best remembered as
a significant pillar of the French New Wave, this 1959
film is now re-released on DVD by the Criterion Collection
in a package full of revealing extra features worthy
of its pedigree. Based on French novelist Margurite
Duras' screenplay, the film tells the story of a French
actress, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), engaged in an adulterous
two day affair with a Japanese architect, Lui (Eiji
Okada), in post WWII Hiroshima.
As
the affair continues, the two protagonists increasingly
become emotionally drawn to each other. The woman reluctantly
reveals to the man her painful and tragic past during
the war in her small German occupied French town of
Nevers. She vulnerably recounts her love affair with
a Nazi soldier and the horrible consequences she experienced
as a result of that forbidden dalliance. Eventually
the Japanese architect declares his love for the woman
and begs her to stay with him. She refuses his request,
seeing acquiescence as a betrayal to the memory of her
German lover.
Originally
intended by Resnais as a documentary on the re-birth
and re-construction of the ravaged city 14 years after
the bombing, "Hiroshima mon amour," quickly
morphed into a fictitious account that oddly (yet successfully)
blends anti-war sentiments with a love story between
two very unlikely individuals. And it is this portrayal
of futile, improbable and forbidden love, interwoven
with the idea of memory and its relationship to the
present, that succeed in this evocative and poignant
story.
Soon
after the film's erotic opening, Resnais effectively
splices grisly newsreel footage of the Nuclear Holocaust
wrought on by the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Yet
successive footage shows that in spite of the horrors
and devastation leveled on Hiroshima, its citizens'
resilience rebuilt the city. In contrast, the woman's
inability to forget, to move beyond the war, and to
insist in projecting her German lover onto her current
Japanese lover, cripples her to love again. Though it
is never implicitly inferred (and it would be pretentious
to do so), the coda to the opening dialogue is that
the woman, in her youth, did experience her own Hiroshima.
The film deals with the complex human necessity of remembering
and forgetting the past - so that one can live.
The
film is especially notable for its technical brilliance
and revolutionary editing techniques that is still considered
to be a significant influence on modern films. Resnais
and his group of editors (Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi,
and Anne Sarraute) fluidly weave the narrative structure
with newsreel footage, disjointed flashback sequences,
quick edits, interior monologues, and voice-overs to
parallel between the past and present. Cinematographers
Michio Takahashi and Sacha Vierny not only do an excellent
job lighting and framing Riva and Okada in sumptuous
black and white but also make the neon-lit city of Hiroshima
a character in its own right. The affecting and haunting
score by Georges Delerue add emotional continuity to
effectively anchor the editing.
This
DVD re-issue of "Hiroshima mon amour" now
includes an invaluably informative and insightful commentary
by British film critic and historian Peter Cowie, two
sets of interviews with Resnais and Riva given during
the film's Cannes Film Festival screening in 1959 and
another set given recently, and excerpts from Duras'
annotations to the script.
October
10, 2003
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