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Hiroshima Mon Amour - Criterion Collection Actors: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada Director: Alain Resnais Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Academy Ratio Format: Black & White Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 91 minutes Studio: Criterion Collection Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2003-06-24 Buy from Amazon |
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From Amazon.com An extraordinary and deeply moving film that retains much of its power since its original release in 1959, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the story of a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) who become lovers in the city of Hiroshima, where the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb to end World War II in the Pacific. Written by Marguerite Duras and juggled, as if by wandering thoughts, in chronology and setting by Resnais, the film reveals the miserable and mortifying experiences of each character during the war and suggests the obvious healing properties of their relationship in the present. An emotional allusion or two can certainly be made with the more recent The English Patient, but nothing can quite prepare one for Resnais's extreme yet intuitively accessible experiments in fusing the past, present, and future into great sweeps of subjectively experienced memory. Yet audiences have never had trouble relating to this bold milestone of the French New Wave, largely because at its heart is a genuinely affecting, soulful love story. --Tom Keogh From Description A cornerstone of French cinema, Alain Resnais' first feature is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. Utilizing an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award®-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Resnais delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish, in this moody masterwork. |
 "Nevers, Mon Amour"The famous opening-shot is meant to shock: Two entwined bodies move like one. The bodies are covered with pustules: Victims of radioactive contamination don't look pretty. The next shot is meant to soothe: The bodies are healthy, their skin is smooth. All we witness is a one-night-stand between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) and the war has been over for 14 years. Thus begins a film with a deceptive simple message: We all try to come to terms with our past. But this burden is not a habit you can drop: it takes root! Riva's roots are in Nevers. Okada's in Hiroshima. And, since her appearance in a film about peace brought Riva to Hiroshima she tells him what she has seen. And this first quarter of an hour when Riva describes what she has seen in Marguerite Duras' beautiful prose while director Alain Resnais powerful images show us what she has seen assures this film's place in movie heaven. The museum. Photos. Reconstructions. Explanations. August 6, 1945, 8.15 a.m. Colonel Tibbets, pilot of the "Enola Gay" released the A-Bomb ("Little Boy") over Hiroshima. "Little Boy" wiped out an entire city in nine seconds. 200.000 dead. 80.000 injured. After the atomic fall-out the hair of Japanese women fell out. They are afraid of giving birth to monsters. Men fear sterility. The skin of children peels off. Others are blind, lost their fingers or are born with fingers in the wrong places. Why dwell on it? Marguerite Duras sums up Hiroshima: "You kill me / You do me good". Riva is well pleased with her lover's scarless skin and the fact that he is happily married. The story of Hiroshima ends in smoke and the rest of the film is dedicated solely to Riva's own "ghosts". I let you into a secret: The film was so successful in France not because it is about Hiroshima but because it deals with a real taboo: collaboration during WWII. Riva, who grew up in Nevers, had an affair with a German officer. He is killed, the gloating villagers shore the disgraced and her dishonored parents locked her in the cellar. She lost her mind and nibbled at the wall! After her hair had grown to a decent length again she had to leave for Paris. At dead of night on her bicycle. HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is an irritating classic. It looks good. It feels good. And the famous subjective flashbacks have seduced critics into comparing it with CITIZEN KANE. And yet an important detail is missing: HIS story. Throughout the film Okada serves exclusively as Riva's Wailing Wall. He does not carp. He does not censure. He does not mind that she shows off with her lovers. Women must have adored him: Such a good listener! One-sidedness is the film's major flaw despite its good intentions. Neither the film's peaceful message nor the director's craftsmanship nor the author's artistic skills were enough to assure the film's success in Japan or elsewhere in Asia. It is what it is: a popular art-house film. I wish that the most popular Anti-Atomic-Bomb film could have had a more far-reaching appeal! "Brilliant. Unusual. Intense. "The reviewer identified as Octavius really missed the point on this film! He/she seems to need secure and sanctioned rules for structuring a work of art. It reminds me of those critics who railed against Beethoven because he "broke the rules" of the self-appointed authorities who could neither hear nor imagine anything beyond Haydn. I agree with Octavius about Philip Glass's ho-hum meandering music. But Glass's music is not at all analogous to this film. I hold a doctorate in music composition and from that perspective, Glass's music evokes virtually nothing for me. And it isn't the structure or "post-modernist" emptiness of it. So much of it just lies there doing nothing and going nowhere. This film is not like that at all. It also does not suggest that anyone is a true hero or villain. It does show the tragedy and the existential angst of war and its aftermath. It does evoke the indecipherable mystery of attraction between people who "shouldn't" be attracted to each other (especially according to what seem to be Octavius's inviolable "rules" for human behavior). It does confront the viewer with the reality of the inexplicable in human relationships. It does not let the viewer avoid the reality of the myriad, compelling, and beckoning forces of the human psyche, conscious and/or unconscious. Those forces can create certain attractions between people that are virtually irresistible. Octavius appears not to understand this. Octavius seems to believe that tight structural control and officially sanctioned modes of artistic expression are sacrosanct. I don't agree. If sacrosanct they were, nothing outside the conventional could ever be attempted. No new forms or directions could be born. Thankfully, that is not the case in art. This is a great film. I highly recommend it. "Can we still love in prescience of our inevitable doom?"When one speaks of the great films of all time - Hiroshima Mon Amour somehow makes it onto most lists. The details of the film have been admirably delineated and debated in the many reviews here - I would rather discuss the question stated above - which I believe is at the heart of the film - impelling the drama - and is the inspiration for its production. The post-modern era began on August 6, 1945 - it is the only 'era' of humanity, for which we can provide an exact beginning date (we're rather proud of our tendency to organize our historicity into the discrete steps of a linear progression - whether or not such a reality actually exists - we get a sense of security from thinking that it does). I believe the stream of consciousness depicted in the film runs a parallel commentary on this tendency as we try to make 'sense' of our individual lives. The love affair is set against the dark facade of our hope of demarcating an end to this era by transcending what seems to be the inexorable nuclear annihilation to which - paradoxically, in our passion for transcendence, we are committed. The grandeur of the film is that (characteristically existential, as in many of the films of the French New Wave which would follow), the viewer is left to choose - is the statement here an affirmation of life - or an expression of its seemingly inescapable futility in an age where too many are committed to violence, greed, and a too easy acceptance of the possibility of Armageddon, against which the film lyrically, magnificently rages? Although the sets alone are worth the price of the dvd (the guy has in his apartment absolutely the best tatami mats and plushest futon get up ever seen)- the meaning is what is really beyond value - a concept so tritely overdone in filmaking these days that most films seem to come straight off the grill. HMA harkens back to a time when the translation was communicated in the care taken with the details - an art which has been lost with the virtualization of real effects.  "A French woman"I haven't finished reading this book yet, but I think it is an interesting book...especially b/c it is written by a female French author. "Easily the most beautiful film EVER made!""Hi-ro-shi-ma" Alain Resnais can easily claim to being one of the greatest directers of all time. Even the New Wave directors admired his work (as the booklet inside the Criterion Collection DVD will have). This movie is purely incomparable to any other movie I have seen... and I have seen many. At the end all I can say is "WOW!" every time. The images and the dialogue are all overly-poetical, and the music only enhances the trance it lays upon you. Even if one doesn't find the story very entertaining, the visuals are reason enough to see this movie: both highly disturbing at some parts but also highly spellbinding at others. I gave it five stars for five reasons: Star # ONE: the directing. Nothing prepared me for a story told like this. Star # TWO: the acting. Emmanuelle Riva is like nothing I've seen before. Star # THREE: the dialogue. At many parts it's as if the characters speak in poems. Star # FOUR: the story. Love. Forgetting. Aftermath of War. Star # FIVE: the music. Entrances the viewer as the imagery does. Absolutely adds to the beauty of it all. For any true film buff, this movie is a cinematic phenomenon. It deserves every one of those five stars and more. |
