Rating: 
Summary: One of the greatest opening montages in cinematic history
Review: "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" begins with what is probably the greatest opening montage since "Citizen Kane." If anything, the contrapuntal dialogue between Emmanuele Riva as the French Actress and Eiji Okada as the Japanese architect over the haunting juxtaposition of their naked bodies with the shots of Hiroshima and its people after the bomb was dropped, overwhelms the rest of the film. Before you see their faces you accept the idea that this is a French film set in Japan, a riveting exploration of the pain of memory. In common they have their personal shames: her head was shaved for sleeping with a German soldier during the occupation, while he feels guilty because he was not in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. Alain Resnais does a masterful job of investing Marguerite Duras' script with visual power. It is difficult to think of other feels that are as provocative, that compel the viewer to think, as much as this one. Strangely enough, the script has been included in the "Norton Anthology of World Literature," a very ironic inclusion given that the power of the opening sequence is so cinematic. But if its presence compels teachers to show "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" in their classes, so much the better. This 1959 film continues to sustain its power.
Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest opening montages in cinematic history
Review: "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" begins with what is probably the greatest opening montage since "Citizen Kane." If anything, the contrapuntal dialogue between Emmanuele Riva as the French Actress and Eiji Okada as the Japanese architect over the haunting juxtaposition of their naked bodies with the shots of Hiroshima and its people after the bomb was dropped, overwhelms the rest of the film. Before you see their faces you accept the idea that this is a French film set in Japan, a riveting exploration of the pain of memory. In common they have their personal shames: her head was shaved for sleeping with a German soldier during the occupation, while he feels guilty because he was not in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. Alain Resnais does a masterful job of investing Marguerite Duras' script with visual power. It is difficult to think of other feels that are as provocative, that compel the viewer to think, as much as this one. Strangely enough, the script has been included in the "Norton Anthology of World Literature," a very ironic inclusion given that the power of the opening sequence is so cinematic. But if its presence compels teachers to show "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" in their classes, so much the better. This 1959 film continues to sustain its power.
Rating:
Summary: Resnais's Masterpiece
Review: After almost a decade of producing short documentaries, Alain Resnais made his debut as a feature-length filmmaker with the adaptation of Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). And what a debut! Arguably one of the most innovative films in the history of cinema, and a masterpiece of the French Nouvelle Vague, Hiroshima is a love story, not about love, but about memories, time, and the dissolution of memories in time. Duras' s screenplay flows and ebbs with poem-like rhythms. Sasha Vierney's photography is stunning, and paints the reality of the tragic love affair. The music is as hauntingly complex as the film itself. And finally, there are the evocative, convincing performances of Emmanuelle Riva (Elle), in her film debut, and Eiji Okada (Lui).The story, at first glance, simple: Fourteen years after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Elle goes to Hiroshima to take part in an anti-war film. On her penultimate night in Hiroshima, Elle meets Lui, a Japanese architect. She returns to her hotel with him. A chance encounter. An ordinary affair. Or is it? Resnais's Hiroshima started as a documentary effort, and in fact, much of the original footage of the aftermath of Hiroshima's bombing is used in the opening fifteen minutes of the finished film. It was this same opening sequence that puzzled many reviewers, who listened in confusion to Elle's description of her experience in Hiroshima, as Lui apparently contradicts her every statement. Several tentative interpretations were proposed for this apparent, although improbable, argument. Why should new lovers argue like an old married couple? The song "Je t'aime... moi non plus," by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin comes to mind. We ask ourselves, have the reviewers never experienced deep sexual rapture? The scene that follows the opening is the key to the rest of the film. Lui is still asleep on his right side, with his right arm outstretched behind him. Elle enters the room. Her glance travels down his arm, to his hand. At that moment, briefly, the arm and the hand are transformed. They belong to someone else -- a dead German soldier. The door to the rest of the story is now ajar. Later, as Lui asks, "What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?" she connects to her thoughts of her first, tragic love of a German soldier in Nevers. Elle has suffered a crippling emotional wound, buried deep in her subconscious, since that time. Little by little, she reveals her secret love affair with the German, first in bits and pieces. As the film progresses, Elle's memories become more precise, more urgent, more intrusive, until eventually the flood gates of her remembrance burst open (a scene in a bar, the night before her departure from Hiroshima). Lui's transformation is complete -- he is now her German lover ("Tu"), not only in her mind, but also in his. The living memory has fused the past with the present. As the story unfolds, past and present images of Nevers and Hiroshima mix and merge in a continuum. The powerful music by Giovanni Fusco and George Delarue guides us through this highly emotional, somewhat chaotic journey. A Japanese-type music accompanies the Hiroshima scenes, while a French-type music follows the memories from Nevers. But, here also, some confusion exists, and at the climax of the story in the bar, a simple Japanese jukebox music links Nevers to the present. As the movie ends, Elle realizes she will again experience the same desperation and loneliness of separation. Lui can only speculate what is in store for him. What both know with a certainty, though, is that only memories will remain. Resnais and Duras show us that without memory, the present has no foundation, and time cannot truly exist. Without memory, it is impossible to understand time or events, as they have no context or framework. Resnais and Duras force us to consider the awful and depressing thought that with the disappearance of our memories, our very existence and soul will be obliterated.
Rating:
Summary: Painful, powerful and unsettling
Review: After sitting through a screening of the film, I am left choking from the emotional turmoil the woman has suffered and how the end of the film predicts the future for both characters. For a few short hours, the two characters are intense lovers -- both physical and spiritual, and the performers couldn't be more perfect. The French woman in the film keeps trying to avoid, then not avoid her present Japanese lover while revealing her past to him. He is the only person with whom she shares her painful memory of having fallen in love with a German soldier during WWII, and with her present lover, she realizes she will undergo the same desperation and loneliness after they have separated. We know little of his character (a flaw in the film) except for the fact that he is very much in love with her. Images of human beings devastated by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima are symbolic of the two lovers: the lovers are also destroyed by outside, uncontrollable elements. Reminiscent of Graham Greene's "End of the Affair," as well as other films about love among the ruins.
Rating:
Summary: Imperfect masterpiece
Review: Alain Renais experimental approach to the narrative structure of 'Hiroshima mon Amour' is one of the finest efforts in cinema history. Whether or not you believe this movie succeeds - you can only admire the approach and the beautiful cinematography of this - Renais first feature. The theme of forgetting or trying to forget is one of the most thought provoking ways of looking at a society (watch Fassbinder's 'Marriage of Maria Braun' for another brilliant take on this theme). The opening montage of images is very unique and beautiful - as shocking as the opening to Bergman's 'Persona'. Anyway, I would reccomend viewing this one and forming your own opinion - which you will inevittably do.
Rating:
Summary: A haunting, yet uplifting love story
Review: An extroadinarily creative, haunting love story of a French woman who comes to the city where the first atomic bomb was dropped and has an affair with a Japanese businessman. No pretensions that it will last (he is married, and loves his wife), and in fact she delivers one of the most memorable lines I have ever heard in summing it up (the translation of which is "All I wanted was an inconsolable memory.") The film explores the themes of cultural conflict (he keeps telling her, the Westerner who he thinks is incapable of understanding, you saw nothing at Hiroshima), the devastating effect of the bomb, and the more universal theme of simultaneously loving one's spouse yet falling passionately in love with a stranger. The film may be slightly pretentious in the way some French films are, with the deliberately sparse and cryptic dialogue, but in spite of that this is a beautiful, strange, compelling film.
Rating:
Summary: A couragious and honest exploration of love
Review: As with most works of art that probe a subtle truth, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" will confuse a lot of people. On the surface, this film appears to be strange glimpse of failed romance and anti-social behavior. The characters, an unidentified French woman and Japanese man are having a brief and transitory love affair in Hiroshima, many years after World War II. Both of them are married (the man professes to love his wife) and neither is a stranger to anonymous love affairs. Although neither party knows the other's name, they share crucial aspects of their history and identity with each other. The man is a resident of Hiroshima who was away serving in the army when the city was bombed. During the war, the woman lived in an occupied French city called Nevers and fell in love with a German soldier. When the soldier was killed the woman was punished for being a collaborator and was subsequently banished to her parents' basement for several month where in her own words she became "mad with spite". The film opens by interweaving scenes of the man and woman making love, with scenes of Hiroshima bombing victims. This tells us that their story-particularly their love affair-is rooted in an act of unimaginable destruction. In the man's case, everything returns to the bombing of Hiroshima. When the woman tells him of the different monuments and documentary footage of the bombing she encountered, he replies that she has seen nothing. In the woman's case, her entire life was redefined the moment her German lover was killed by French partisans. The act of destruction was personally more traumatic and pivotal than the war itself. Worse yet was her tremendous sense of failure in surviving this event and being able to continue life without her lover. The man is inescapably a product of the bombing of Hiroshima just as the woman is a product of her experience in Nevers. The woman tells the man that until her affair with him, she has never loved anyone the way she loved the German soldier. She shares her sense of failure at having survived the death of the German solider with the man. The beginning of courtship and love often involves putting one's best foot forward, so to speak-of promoting oneself in order to appeal to the other person. But this film argues that the foundation of love is something more sacred and more sensible. It is often a person's deepest sense of failure, fear, or inadequacy that defines who that person really is. The woman attests to this by stating that her true sense of self began when she emerged from her eight months of confinement in her parents' basement. She tells the man that aside from him, no one including her husband understands that that experience made her who she is today. The Japanese man expresses great joy in being the only one in the world who knows. He comprehends the magnitude of her gift and its testament of her love for him. The love affair between the man and the woman is a doomed and paradoxical one. The woman gives herself to the man completely, but she can only do so because their relationship is free of any obligation to each other. They meet only for the purpose of loving each other under anonymous and temporary conditions. For them no other role is possible. At the end of the film, the loves part without revealing their names. The woman tells the man his name is "Hiroshima" and he replies, "Yes, and yours is Nevers. Nevers in France." In refusing to disclose their names, the lovers banish their public identities from the momentary world that they have created for themselves. A love affair is essentially the creation of a new world that is populated only by two people under specific conditions. Entirely new things become important. Streets, restaurants, and hotel rooms that would normally mean nothing suddenly take on an incalculable significance. In this case, Hiroshima is the place where their love affair takes place, which implies that the city is destroyed twice: first by the bombing and then by the end of the affair. Of course the film begins with the scenes of the lovers intertwined with scenes of the bombing. In the years to come, whenever the woman hears of Hiroshima she will immediately think of both. Like the love that defined who she was as a human being, this one too is rooted in unimaginable destruction. While the film is superb in its own right, one should really read the original screen play by Marguerite Duras since it sheds much light on the characters in the film. The screen play describes the Japanese man as having Western features and hardly looking like a typical Asian male. Duras purposely requested this so that viewers would not see the Japanese man as exotic or unusual. The Japanese is further described as being worldly in the sense that he is conversant in several languages and involved in politics. Duras states that he is the kind of man who would be at home in any country. Similarly the woman is described as being not very beautiful. In the film the man tells her that he was first interested in her because she looked bored. The attraction defies typical filmic clichés but makes sense is subtle ways. While this film may alienate many viewers, it will hopefully leave most with a deeper impression and with a series of questions. What does it really mean to love someone? What is the real definition of fidelity? What else does war destroy besides physical things such as people, materials, and the environment? What is trust? What defines a person's identity, success or failure?
Rating: 
Summary: french new wave - crashing bore
Review: At the time of this writing, there was only one one-star review amidst the 5 and 4-star accolades. I'm writing this in support of the one who had the courage to stand alone against the cinematic intelligentsia who find powerful meaning and artistic beauty in this film.
After reading such superlatives as, "one of the most influencial films of all time", I had to check it out. I'll admit that I'm not a fan of foreign film in general and my exposure to older European cinema consists of "Metropolis","Night and Fog","The Seventh Seal" and "The Pasion of Joan of Arc", but I can appreciate each of them for their artistry and contribution to cinema. "Hiroshima Mon Amour" was to me, a failed experiment.
On the surface, it seems to be a story about a self-absorbed French nymphomaniac, Elle, slowly loosing her mind as she reveals her past to a casual sex partner, Lui, that she's just met in Hiroshima. They're both "happily married", which in 1959 apparently meant that all adulterous encounters were limited to one-night stands. In spite of their powerful connection, they both know that a lasting relationship is out of the question. As she pours her heart out to him in a bar, sometimes she talks about the past as if it were the present, other times she doesn't. She describes a forbiddden love affair with a German soldier (during WWII) and how she was tortured by her family because of it; someone shaves her head and confines her in a cellar. She talks to Lui as if she is reliving her past and he is the German soldier. So what does Lui ask her after hearing this? He wants to know if it ever rained. She replies, "Along the walls". What have these people been smoking? Director Resnais fails utterly to make any of this understandable. I've read that this story is about memory and how without it, we can't know that we exist. If you suddenly woke up with your memory wiped clean, you'd be mightily confused, but you'd know that you exist; "I think, therefore I am". In the film, Lui says to Elle, "In a few years when I have forgotten you...I'll remember you as the symbol of love's forgetfulness". I'll remember when I've forgotten?? You're a symbol of love's forgetfulness...whom I remember?? Yeah, OK, now if I can just remember to forget this film.
Rating: 
Summary: Love among the psychological ruins
Review: Director Alain Resnais' extremely matter-of-fact portrait of an adulterous, interracial relationship was considered frank to the point of shocking in 1959; today few will be even mildly startled. But while time has dimmed this aspect of the film, it has not dimmed the complex and very poetic nature of the film as a whole, and HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR remains one of the finest examples of French "New Wave" cinema. The story itself is simple. An actress (Emmanuelle Riva) has come to Hiroshima to appear in an international film promoting peace. Two days before she is scheduled to return to France, she casually picks up a Japanse architect (Eiji Okada.) Instead of the casual sexual encouter they expect, the two find a profound physical and emotional passion. The depth of this passion leads Riva to make revelations about a tragic wartime romance to Okada--a revelation that leaves her emotionally fractured and vulnerable to Okada's demands that she remain in Hiroshima with him. The two are then faced with the choice of destroying their marriages by continuing the relationship or parting never to see each other again, with neither choice really desirable. A description of the storyline does not in any way describe what director Resnais does with it. The two leads are exceptional in their handling of the equally exceptional script, which presents us with a series of visual and verbal motifs (hair, hands, heads) that gradually acquire a poetic quality. The cinematography and editing manage to merge a documentary tone with a poetic lyricism. And much of the film's complexity lies in the way it treats the city of Hiroshima, which was destroyed by the atomic bomb and yet rebuilt itself; the city becomes a metaphor for the couple's relationship, the tragedies of passing time, the transient nature of memory, and everything that is both best and worst in human passion. Ultimately, HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR does not present us with any easy answers, either about the couple its story presents or the nature of human passion in all its guises; it also requires full concentration, a certain degree of patience, and the ability to grasp metaphorical content. Because of this, I do not really recommend the film to a purely casual viewer--but those actively seeking a complex cinematic experience will find it makes a powerful, multi-layered statement, and for them I recommend it very highly indeed.
Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: Duras and Resnais produced a masterpiece. The film is powerful, poignant, and well-worth viewing not just once, but repeatedly. The graphic imagery of the aftermath of Hiroshima and the brief love affair of "elle" and "lui" combine on the screen, as dialogues of the past and present produce the warning for the future: forget, and it could all happen again.
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