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She is an actress and is in Hiroshima to shoot a film. A film about peace "what other kind of film could be made in Hiroshima if not a film about peace?"
She meets Him. He is Japanese, an architect, also involved in politics but that's not important.
They meet, spend the night together, they love each other.
They love each other, they love each other too much, but the next day she will play her part in the film and the day after tomorrow she will leave, they will never see each other again…
Hiroshima mon amour. A 1959 film directed by Alan Resnais is a film of rare intensity.
The long initial prologue is anthology-worthy. Hiroshima is devastated… men, women, and children tortured, raped, devastated, deformed, overturned by the bomb… Now no one walks along the riverbanks anymore. While we witness all this, two voices off-screen (her and him) speak to each other, but it is not a conventional dialogue, perhaps not even a dialogue, it almost seems like a two-voice poem. Evocative, theatrical, terse, hermetic, bitter.
Love, therefore. The love between a man and a woman. Love is the central theme of the film or maybe not, I mean perhaps not only, but certainly, love is portrayed in a total, absolute, and eternal way. Does it exist, does it not exist? That's not the point. In Hiroshima mon amour it exists, it's true, it's real, it's like a religion, it's an epiphany, it's indissoluble, indelible.
Perhaps not only love, as we were saying.
Of course, Hiroshima, the atomic bomb. Human folly, pain, death, disease, horror, horror, horror… but love is stronger, a French girl of only 18 who lived in Nevers fell in love with a soldier, an invading soldier, a German, had it not been for the war, they would have married in Bavaria…
The film is a boulder. If it were only the intensity and power through which this love is represented … but that's not all. Because throughout its duration the film, slow and relentless, proceeds solemn and resolute, compact without concessions and without fractures and always permeated by a thick layer of anguish and dismay, which put like this one might even think “…and why should I watch it?” eh well, consider that if blockbusters are pop music, this is chamber music, the dark and almost ghostly music of the cello to which, however, other instruments will be added…
You are Hiroshima.
You are Nevers.
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