Inclubabu
Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
Supelice
Dreadfully Boring
Beanbioca
As Good As It Gets
Nicolas
This movie isn't a movie. It's a poem. When poetry becomes film you get this kind of masterpieces. It's a slow-paced, beautifully shot, heartbreaking love story. It's a touching, human, meaningful film about oblivion. Duras' prose is just unbelievably poetic and Riva's performance as an independent –yet so attached to her lost lover– woman brings the film to a new level of groundbreaking way of storytelling. The dialogues between her and Okada are about things we've all thought and felt every now and then. It takes place in Hiroshima fifteen years after the bomb and I find it brilliant how the movie talks about the global tragedy that was the dropping of an atomic bomb and the personal tragedy that is to lose and try not to forget the man you loved. As it is the script what struck me the most, I personally don't think this is as much as a Resnais' film as it is Duras'. Almost 60 years already. Everyone with a major role in the movie is gone. But they are not dead. They just became "Hiroshima Mon Amour". Might we not forget them.
sharky_55
Two lovers are entwined in embrace, shot in close-up so that their bodies are twisted and joined together but their identities obscured. And then ash and sand suddenly cover every spot of their skin, and the historical and emotional baggage begin to weigh down on what would normally be a simple tryst, a quiet little affair. It is the horrific aftermath of Hiroshima soiling the bed and their passion. The woman, played by Emmanuelle Riva, is engaging in pillow talk of the most macabre kind, and the man, later revealed to be the Japanese and French speaking Eiji Okada, is busy shushing her and stroking and kissing instead. Only later does Resnais reveal what would add extra weight to these whispers; he was a soldier in the war while the bomb eradicated the city and his family - she a nurse, then actually an actress, and long ago chastised for crossing the boundaries that war so harshly marks. Resnais is one of the few directors to have mastered the flashback, which is an easy tool to incorporate but harder to submerge it within the consciousness of the character that revisits the past. In first and foremost the haunting Night and Fog, and later Marienbad and Muriel, among others of his repertoire, he crafted a use for the technique not as a storytelling device to convey information but as a way of investigating the tricky nature of memory and truth - and how they can be warped over time. Amidst the longer journeys into the past, Resnais imbues a sense of selective and wilful forgetfulness into his documentary-type footage. His compositions show the wide extent of the devastation of the a- bomb, and then jump back into the more immediate past, where the camera tracks faceless visitors of the museum that contains all the irrevocable evidence. He will align the camera with a figure walking through the hospitals and seeing the patients with its own eyes, only for Okada to quickly interrupt with an objection of this first hand experience. This is contested with harrowing images that speak for themselves; masses of lost hair, scraps of twisted metal, insects emerging from the ash and bodies with all sorts of deformations - only to dissolve to the pair stroking and whispering of each other's beautiful skin, actions which slowly begin to become laden with guilt. The pair's dialogue reveal themselves to be more or less realists about the whole situation. They work in strange and sometimes foreign locations, far away from the family - their short-lived affairs are symbolic of the post-war displacement of the family unity. They have done this before, and expect to do this again. The woman freely flaunts her 'dubious morals', more risqué than most of the women of the screen of her time, and playfully assumes the man will feel the same way when she has to leave the next day. But Resnais probes, using one of his favoured techniques, and pieces of memory begin to emerge from this front: a brief match-cut flashing a likeness to one of the corpses of the past. Drink lowers the last of her inhibitions and she bravely recounts her tale. The visual mastery of the film is evident. Whilst she excavates the past and the camera drifts along the river Nevers, bicycling in the open fields and her butchered hair paraded through the streets in full daylight, the darkness of the bar closes in on the pair until Riva's pale face is the last refuge in almost pitch black. She is slowly positioned to have the reflections of the river hit her eyes as she gets deeper into her story, until ghostly tendrils and wisps of feeble light dance over her profile and softly illuminate the single tear falling from her left eye while the right side is all but submerged. And when she walks along the streets of the city at night Resnais employs a dramatically skewed low angle so the buildings, dark as they are and flickering with cold light, tower over her tiny figure, emblematic of a modernity that has left the human behind. Hiroshima mon amour was made in the aftermath of one of the more frightening events in our recent history. It depicts a time where the bomb, a symbol for the wider technological advancements of the age, was thought by some to be overshadowing and overpowering human nature. We had knowledge and use of guns and missiles before, but never had mass murder been quite so impersonal, and never had we been able to wield a weapon with such deadly potential for long term devastation. It was technology beyond moral sense, and more sophisticated than the human spirit and intelligence that had designed and overseen its deployment. The film fashions its response in the personal connection of two lovers in the newer, stranger Hiroshima, still trying desperately to rebuild and move on from the past. First, they convince themselves this is like any other affair they have embarked on, and that in a few years all will be forgotten. Then, they try to bury history but in doing so only unlock past traumas. They seek solace in physical action, and a hope that time will stop for them (throughout Okada is attempting to convince her to extend her stay) - again, a fruitless endeavour. It is finally through a refusal of denial that they find a new starting point. The mistakes of the past are voiced clearly and out loud, and only then can we begin to move forward.
disinterested_spectator
Elle is a French actress on location in Hiroshima, where she meets Lui, a Japanese architect. She is married with children, and he is married too, but they have sex anyway, because they both cheat on their spouses on a regular basis. After a single night, they fall madly in love with each other, convinced that the sex they had was deep and meaningful, so deep and meaningful, in fact, that when they cheat on their respective spouses with other paramours in the future, as they have every intention of so doing, they think that it will never be as good as what they have with each other right now. Of course, if they were free to marry each other, they would probably be cheating on each other in a couple years too, but that either does not seem to occur to them, or it occurs to them, but they don't care, because they are the kind of people who think they are entitled to cheat.Although the movie is set in Hiroshima, where reference is naturally made to the atom bomb, this proves to be nothing more than a way of providing an excuse for Elle to talk about what she was doing in France when the bomb went off. From there she eventually tells about how she loved a German soldier, who was killed by a sniper, and how she was ostracized for having sex with him, causing her to have a nervous breakdown. She thinks that German soldier was the great love of her life, but given the kind of woman she is, we know that she would have been cheating on him in no time.Since the movie is set in Hiroshima, and since Lui is a Japanese citizen, you might think Elle's story about how she suffered so much during the war would be matched by a story from Lui about his experience during that period. Nope. All we get is that he was in the army. Well, after all, this is a French movie and not a Japanese movie, so it is only the French experience that the movie deems worthy of consideration.
gavin6942
A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) filming an anti-war film in Hiroshima has an affair with a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) as they share their differing perspectives on war.This film started out as a documentary, which seems evident from all the footage of Hiroshima following World War II. But then Marguerite Duras was brought in to add a fictionalized element. I think that was an interesting choice. Although Duras was a known writer and director in France, to Americans she is probably only known for her novel "The Lover", about an affair between a French woman and a Chinese man, not a far removal from this romance.The film was a major catalyst for the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave), making highly innovative use of miniature flashbacks to create a uniquely nonlinear storyline. While (in my opinion) not nearly as accomplished as the director's "Last Year at Marienbad", the influence is striking, and it is a shame that Alain Resnais is not better known in America.
