A restoration of the 1959 French New Wave film Hiroshima, Mon Amour is screening at the wonderful Film Forum, and I was lucky enough to catch it as it entered its final week. I decided to see it because I knew nothing of it, other than a passing familiarity with the lofty reputation of its director, Alain Resnais. I think it's important to engage in cultural experiences that are mostly unknown--we know too much of everything before we do it nowadays.
The film isn't long, but it feels about twice its 90 minute running time. There isn't an entertaining moment to be found anywhere in it. I've never seen such a resolutely un-entertaining film. It's quite a different feeling, watching something that not only has absolutely no interest in entertaining you, but that finds the very idea of people being entertained by a series of filmed images to be absurd.
Americans tend to have two modes: work and play. We get very uncomfortable when we're neither working nor being entertained. We need at least one or the other at all times, otherwise we start to feel odd. The confidence with which the film refuses to entertain you is the most striking political element it communicates.
As the title suggests, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is all about love, that most important, but least understood, aspect of the human condition. It starts off with a woman's voice (Emmanuelle Riva) talking about witnessing the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, while images of unimaginable but real life suffering assault our eyes. Her feverish musings are periodically punctuated by a man's voice (Eiji Okada) doubting the veracity of her claims.
After a good long stretch of the woman's voice mixing with the truly garish images, we finally see the source of the voices. Riva and Okada are laying naked in bed together, tightly, greedily squeezing each other's flesh. The woman (who, like her male counterpart, goes unnamed) reveals herself to be a French woman visiting Hiroshima to play a bit part as a nurse in an anti-war film. She met the man, a Hiroshima native who speaks fluent French, at a bar the night before, and they've been rolling around smitten in bed all night.
As they both take their time getting dressed for the day the next morning, her in a nurse outfit, him in some casual business attire, she starts closing off and icing him out, if only just a bit. Understandably, as beautiful as she is, he tries to keep their effortlessly warm mutual flirtation going, while she keeps pulling away. It comes across mostly as the necessary putting up of a front after an intense, though initial, encounter. Her cavalier attitude toward commitment is attractive, playful, confident, and irresistible. It's a supremely healthy outlook on courtship, and exactly what someone as beautiful as late 1950s Emmanuelle Riva would do.
He refuses to allow the passionate night, which was probably among the most memorable and significant of his life, to be cast as a typical, casual thing to be treated with cool indifference. He has to believe that it was as good a thing for her as it was for him, and he doesn't believe that the night means as little to her as she's making it seem.
Later, they meet up in a cafe for drinks, and her defenses come crashing down. In a scene that by itself takes up about half the film, she tells him everything about her past. She was a teenager in a tiny town called Nevers in occupied France during the war, and fell in love with a Nazi. We see images of her younger self running around to barns, cabins, and fields with her Nazi lover, while she narrates to her Hiroshima lover. When the war ends and her affair is discovered, her parents lock her in a cellar for years, cutting her hair short, and depriving her of food. She takes to licking saltpeter from the walls to sustain herself, and claws at the walls until her fingers bleed. These are hard images to look at, as upsetting in their own way as the deformities caused by the nuclear bomb.
Her new lover makes it clear that he still loves her, indeed loves her more for sharing her dark past. She is nevertheless despondent. She takes to wandering around Hiroshima in a melancholic haze, while he trails behind her, giving her space to sort through her perma-gloom.
During her prolonged confession, she says the name of the town where she loved a Nazi and was later imprisoned over and over and over again, Nevers, Nevers, Nevers. He is enchanted by the name as well, saying it repeatedly, Nevers, Nevers, Nevers. It takes on a sort of mythical quality within the film, as a code word for a past that intrudes into every present.
When the film ends, it becomes clear to both of them that they won't be able to move forward with their relationship. Though she's free of her past now, she can't be free with the person who helped her escape. She's ready to live in the present, and had to fall in love to be able to do it. But it is a love that had to be used as a pivot point, a building block for future loves, not as a resting point in itself. It's a shame they didn't meet after she had already been freed.
We fall in love so we can be close enough to another person to express our hang ups and work through them--hopefully eventually this way reaching a point where we have a nearly negligible amount to work through, and can be empty of our past enough to build a future with someone else. We can't truly empty ourselves of our past through our own efforts alone--we need someone else to help us, but for them to help us as much as possible, they have to fall in love with us. But it is a cynical, goal-oriented love.
This is why he tells her, in the film's final line, that he will remember her as Never, after she tells him she will remember him as Hiroshima. To each other, they are representations of a time when they made real strides in being able to journey toward full lives. A doomed love, but a necessary one. Perhaps we need a certain amount of doomed loves to become who we are.
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