Ashen covered bodies amorously entangle and hold one another as soot gradually trickles down like snow - the shapes slowly turn into glittering figures. The ash on the writhing limbs fades away and in its place is sweat seething with passion. Abruptly a man's voice pronounces "You saw nothing in Hiroshima - nothing." A woman retorts defensively "I saw everything!" This is the opening sequence to Alain Resnais' film "Hiroshima mon amour." Best remembered as a significant pillar of the French New Wave, this 1959 film is now re-released on DVD by the Criterion Collection in a package full of revealing extra features worthy of its pedigree. Based on French novelist Margurite Duras' screenplay, the film tells the story of a French actress, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), engaged in an adulterous two day affair with a Japanese architect, Lui (Eiji Okada), in post WWII Hiroshima.
As the affair continues, the two protagonists increasingly become emotionally drawn to each other. The woman reluctantly reveals to the man her painful and tragic past during the war in her small German occupied French town of Nevers. She vulnerably recounts her love affair with a Nazi soldier and the horrible consequences she experienced as a result of that forbidden dalliance. Eventually the Japanese architect declares his love for the woman and begs her to stay with him. She refuses his request, seeing acquiescence as a betrayal to the memory of her German lover.
Originally intended by Resnais as a documentary on the re-birth and re-construction of the ravaged city 14 years after the bombing, "Hiroshima mon amour," quickly morphed into a fictitious account that oddly (yet successfully) blends anti-war sentiments with a love story between two very unlikely individuals. And it is this portrayal of futile, improbable and forbidden love, interwoven with the idea of memory and its relationship to the present, that succeed in this evocative and poignant story.
Soon after the film's erotic opening, Resnais effectively splices grisly newsreel footage of the Nuclear Holocaust wrought on by the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Yet successive footage shows that in spite of the horrors and devastation leveled on Hiroshima, its citizens' resilience rebuilt the city. In contrast, the woman's inability to forget, to move beyond the war, and to insist in projecting her German lover onto her current Japanese lover, cripples her to love again. Though it is never implicitly inferred (and it would be pretentious to do so), the coda to the opening dialogue is that the woman, in her youth, did experience her own Hiroshima. The film deals with the complex human necessity of remembering and forgetting the past - so that one can live.
The film is especially notable for its technical brilliance and revolutionary editing techniques that is still considered to be a significant influence on modern films. Resnais and his group of editors (Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi, and Anne Sarraute) fluidly weave the narrative structure with newsreel footage, disjointed flashback sequences, quick edits, interior monologues, and voice-overs to parallel between the past and present. Cinematographers Michio Takahashi and Sacha Vierny not only do an excellent job lighting and framing Riva and Okada in sumptuous black and white but also make the neon-lit city of Hiroshima a character in its own right. The affecting and haunting score by Georges Delerue add emotional continuity to effectively anchor the editing.
This DVD re-issue of "Hiroshima mon amour" now includes an invaluably informative and insightful commentary by British film critic and historian Peter Cowie, two sets of interviews with Resnais and Riva given during the film's Cannes Film Festival screening in 1959 and another set given recently, and excerpts from Duras' annotations to the script.