Another look at Hiroshima, Mon Amour

I watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour years ago. I remember parts of it, but it wasn't particularly clear to me. Recently I finished a book about The French New Wave which included a section about the Left Bank filmmakers which includes the director of Hiroshima, Alain Resnais. In the discussion about Hiroshima, the author filled me in on a lot of details I missed the first time I watched the film. The first time I saw the film I was unaware that Riva, the main character had had an affair with a German soldier near where she grew up. After the liberation of her town, the soldier was killed and she was humiliated. The townspeople shaved her head and her parents through her in the cellar when she started to breakdown from the humiliation and screaming fits she suffered from. The book also discussed how memory played a big role in the film. It is her memory of Niver that informs most of the film's narrative. After the initial thirty minutes or so, the film starts to flashback to Niver from Japan. The book I was reading says the Japanese man inserts himself into the French woman's past. Yet she doesn't allow him total access. It is her memory and she stays true to her recollection of humiliation and suffering.

I must admit that this film is one of the more difficult films to make sense of. It's structure is very disjointed. It goes from present to flashback, dialogue to voice over, Japan to France quickly. Yet I couldn't ignore Riva's suffering or the suffering of Hiroshima's residents from the nuclear bomb. This film wasn't initially released in the US because of the sympathy it arouses for Hiroshima and Riva's character. And it only played out of competition at the Cannes film festival in 1959. Yet it is sympathy which is engendered from this film. Sympathy for Hiroshima; was it really necessary to drop the bomb? The film includes some Cinema Verite-like shots of victims of the bombing. They are graphic and caused me to be taken aback at the burns suffered from the a-bomb.

Then the film shows the anguish that Riva's character goes through in deciding to leave Hiroshima. Should she stay with her Japanese lover? Or return to France and her husband? She is torn apart by the decision. And the ending is ambiguous as to whether she returns or not.

 I thought Hiroshima is a great film about memory and how it affects someone in the present. Riva's character seems to be bounding from place to place, searching for something, that she doesn't find. Peace? Of mind? Emotional stability? She cracks up twice during the film and anyone with that type past has to bear a burden that no one should have to bear. I guess it is like that when memories come flooding back to you years after you have lived through hard times. And how we deal with it in the past. We rationalize it and just something of the time. It's a passing of youth into adulthood. Yet we can't escape our past. Eventually it catches up to us. Or we keep searching for something to relieve the burden of the past.