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Hiroshima Mon Amour is as pretentious viewing for a Saturday afternoon as any film gets. A late 1950s French film shot in black and white that depicts an intensely erotic two-day affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect, that takes place in Hiroshima fifteen years after the bomb with flashbacks to German occupied France, is bound to draw accusations of being over-determined and too artificially self-conscious. But it works. The haunting music score and the beautifully composed shots of people lounging in empty, deserted spaces, grappling with the past makes for delicious viewing.
The opening montage sequence – the bodies of the lovers wrapped up with each other against shots of Hiroshima after the bomb – is a powerful reminder that the personal always partakes of social and political memory. As the film proceeds, the female protagonist, a french actress Elle, relates the affair she had in WW2 with a German soldier – "I was barely 18 and he was 23" – and the subsequent ostracism that she suffers at the hands of her parents and the community. The flashbacks of the beautifully spartan French countryside – "In France the Loire is known for its beauty" – stand as an effective contrast to a Hiroshima that twinkles late into the night. It is a Hiroshima that wants to forget the past and rebuild itself, but remains "haunted by the day of ten thousand suns". In a bar the couple sit, as the Hiroshima night sky is dominated by a replica of the Effiel Tower. A strange meshing of cultures, a strange thwarting of the ability to forget.
And they speak to no one else. Even when they talk to each other – he asking the questions, she painfully remembering – they seem to barely notice the presence of the other. In a particularly memorable scene at the train station, they sit on a bench with an old lady between them. In a rare moment of naturalism, the old lady asks the architect, "Is she from France?" and the camera lingers on a brief exchange where he explains that they are in love but very sad that they must leave each other with the coming of the morning. And on cue, the camera pans to the other end of the bench, to find that Elle has left. The intensity of the affair must not be spoken of. To do so exorcises the emotions that haunt it, that make it so destructively appealing.
It’s one of those movies that make you wonder about those little moments you’ve spent noticing someone else and wondering where their past resides and how the past has led them to this point. Get it and watch it – it’s in the Esplanade.