Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

glofau Hiroshima Mon Amour is brilliantly made and brilliantly acted, with a thoughtful, poetic script by the great French writer, Marguerite Duras. Its images are lyrical, disturbing, fascinating, and its anti-war message is profound and still frighteningly relevant. But in terms of strict entertainment...Any film which begins with abstracted images of the entwined body parts of human lovers, slowly becoming encrusted with ash and (presumably) atomic fallout... and then spends an obscure 15 minutes arguing about the death and disfigurement of multitudes during the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima, and the nature of memory and forgetfulness... well, you realize immediately that this movie isn't set up to go anyplace fun. Unless your idea of "fun" is witnessing someone else's graphic misery without the cleansing catharsis that accompanies a more conventional tragedy. Hey, some people enjoy that kind of thing! Not me, but to each his/her own.Despite a structure which is famous for meandering through time, the film's narrative is fairly cogent and non-confusing, which is a plus. But the central illicit, inter-racial affair between a French actress and the Japanese architect whom she hooks up with during a film shoot in Hiroshima... It doesn't really make any sense. From the tiny acorn of a chance hookup, grows a mad-passionate love affair based almost entirely on memories dredged from the actress' past, which she disgorges to the architect, rather like a colorless Scheherezade, as she loses all rational connection to the present, conflating a youthful indiscretion with a deceased German soldier (and her subsequent descent into madness) with the non-happenings surrounding her current Japanese amour. German, Japanese... clearly, she can't tell these Axis races apart! I understand that the point of the film was not to create strict narrative coherence, but rather to delve into some kind of symbolic and psychic clash between this cold-yet-overwrought union of a French woman and her obsessed Japanese lover, and the horrors of War. But, despite some moments which are outright absurdist in effect, the overall tone of the film is grinding in its humorlessness. As I watched the characters fatalistically surrendering to their doom, all I could think was, "man, that Marguerite Duras must have been a drag to be romantically involved with." I mean, the Duras script, for all it's poetic symbolism and intellectual brilliance, etc etc, tells a story of people who are criminally passive and hopelessly clingy. Love seems to transform her characters into mere victims, of love, of war, of life, masochistically reveling in their own operatic suffering while doing virtually nothing. As the nameless SHE recalls her own suffering during her madness, scraping her fingertips off on the saltpeter-encrusted walls of her parent's cellar-prison, then receiving validation of existence by luxuriously sucking her own blood from her ravaged hands because otherwise she is utterly alone, all I could think was... Oh brother! This character is so badly damaged, how did she ever manage to get happily married before she embarked on this chance affair in Japan? The imagery is fabulous and intense, but are these really human beings that could have plausibly embarked on a journey together? One human being, actually, because the Japanese architect is little more than a handsome cipher of "love"... love, in this story, apparently meaning the obsession that arises from the act of physical copulation, an experience which is equated with destruction of the nuclear holocaust variety. So, Marguerite Duras clearly had issues surrounding her expression and experience of sexuality. And the film betrays little in the way of empathy, either, the characters are infused with an undercurrent of intense selfishness as they struggle to connect. HE is constantly delving into HER unhappy past even though it can give neither of them any pleasure or joy. The more HE delves, the more SHE becomes hopelessly entangled, and the more obsessed HE becomes... until the cold and bitter end.At least in an opera, you get to revel in an outpouring of passion! In this bitter pill, everything is so cold and humorless... well, it really is difficult to understand why people wax enthusiastic over this film so much. There is much here to ADMIRE... but not much to love, in my opinion. Except intellectually, because the film is awash with symbolism and thought-provoking moments. As a viewing experience for the average intellectual, such as myself, however, I felt that once was enough. The time jumping and abstractions and other critically lauded elements of this movie have been done better and more entertainingly by others. Though this is the most emotionally powerful anti-nuclear statement I've ever seen, for which, as someone who had much of his family die in the Hiroshima nuclear blast, I am profoundly grateful.

Anthony Iessi "Hiroshima Mon Amour" is another bomb-centric, left-winged, political romance by "Nouvelle Vague" mainstay Alain Resnais. It centers on a young actress, landing a part in an anti-war picture being filmed in Hiroshima, Japan. Hiroshima, as you know, is the heart of the one of the world's most shocking attacks, the droppings of the atomic bomb, "Little Boy", by the United States of America. There, she meets a charming, dashing Japanese man, and by nightfall, they engage in hot, sparkly intercourse. As they make love, "She" keeps thinking of the tragedy of Hiroshima. "She" remembers being there. "She" remembers the children that died, the diseases that aroused, the buildings petrified and the shadows of the people that perished solidified in the ground below. "He" tries to figure out why she is saying such horrible things while lovemaking. Is it the fact that she's in an anti-war picture, or did she know about Hiroshima? After days of questioning and conversation, it is revealed that "She" has chosen to engage in such a love affair after losing her lover during the war, back in her home in Nevers, France. She was in love with a German soldier. Considering the political implications of what the Nazis did to France during WWII, her entire family was unbelievably outraged. They punished her by locking her underneath the house and shredding her beautiful hair to pieces. "She" is a rebel, and perhaps a traitor of her own country, but she did it out of love for her man. "She" and "He" bond over such an intimate, taboo tale and proceed to psychologically torture each other in furious, politically charged lust. Not only were they longing for each other, they were longing for revenge. "Hiroshima Mon Amour", is in essence, an open-handed slap in the face to allied powers of WWII. It's a message, not just of anti-nukes, but a complete rejection of national pride, in favor of lustful revenge. Resnais's political implications are brash to say the least, but through his anger at the destructive nature of the war, he constructed one of the most passionate, incredible love stories of all time. It's a romance of death. It's a movie that refuses to accept the sorrow around itself, and locks itself deep within the arms of the weak and powerless. Many people say that sleep is the best revenge and sometimes it's good living, but here, good loving. The performances sold the entire thing for me. Vastly overlooked for her performance is the lovely Emmanuelle Riva, as "She". Only now, as an elderly woman is she getting her award show dues, but what else can you expect from the Academy? They never recognize the best performances when they're right in front of them. I truly believed these two as lovers, and I wouldn't be any bit surprised if a real relationship budded behind the scenes.

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.

Framescourer What a super film. The magic sets in from the top with a lovely neoclassical score from Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco which surfaces throughout the film as added perfume. But this isn't some sort of layered, misty eyed romance. The story-telling is quite to the point, the only overlap coming as the words of Emanuelle Riva drift across from the present in post-nuclear blitz Hiroshima to war-time France and her bittersweet illicit love affair with.Love stories work best when they do not have a happy ending - such is The English Patient, Lovestory, Casablanca... indeed this 1942 film lends itself to the coda of the film where the cycle of falling in love and then walking away from it again perpetuates itself once more. The ardent but bitterly resigned Eiji Okada tells Riva that he wishes he had known her at her first flush of love, when the reality of the end of such an affair was still consigned in ignorance. The experience of the affair in the present and the love of the now-fixed past in conveyed brilliantly in familiar New Wave jump cuts, making connections between people and feeding the story slowly. In 1959 neon-lit nighttime Japan must have looked as alien as provincial France in the 1940s looks halcyon now.The film is carried by Emanuelle Riva, a beautiful, technically capable actress who has worked consistently throughout her career and is coming to prominence now, having just won a BAFTA for her role in Michael Haneke's Amour. 8/10