A technical marvel and an otherwise confounding film experience, Hiroshima Mon Amour seems to me to be exactly what it was originally commissioned to be… a short documentary of the atomic bomb stretched into a feature by a director not entirely sure of what they wanted to accomplish from it.
The first 15 minutes or so play out in much the same way I recall the short film La Jetee doing so, with constant transient bits of narration interspersed on top of some unsettling footage. It's a discombobulating burst of fleeting thoughts and feelings about the holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb upon Hiroshima during World War II that toys with the notions of memory and perception.
Alas, fifteen minutes into the film the pseudo-documentary atmosphere is dropped and we find out the narration was all unpleasant pillow talk between two lovers, a French woman referred to simply by the name of Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man called Lui (Eiji Okada). They both admit to being "happily married" but get caught up in a passionate affair with one another… although the acting would never let you know it.
All we get from their relationship is Lui's fascination with Elle's backstory, their willingness to fall back into bed with one another, and Elle's view that this affair too will pass and its memory forgotten. There is no chemistry between the two leads which ultimately gives no credence to their infatuation with one another. The two have known each other only a day and their actions toward one another always seem hollow, lonely and emotionless. I was never able to buy into their desperate form of love, a reaction that kept me at arms length from the rest of the film.
It isn't until the film moves into flashbacks that the story carries any emotional weight (outside of the admittedly horrifying opening 15 minutes). When Elle starts to recall a previous affair she'd had with a German officer during WWII, finally there is a spark of true feeling. Riva's performance picks up and it was immediately recognizable just how powerful and innovatively Resnais' used flashbacks throughout. His ability to show the importance and solemn nature of the memory on Elle with just a momentary, inaudible clip was astonishing. It's not surprising that IMDb attributes Hiroshima Mon Amour as the, "film [that] pioneered the use of jump cutting to and from a flashback, and of very brief flashbacks to suggest obtrusive memories."
There are also some astonishing shots and vivid images Resnais captures. He introduces the characters in narration before ever showing them, and even as we're introduced he unveils them slowly, only in extreme close-ups of the lovers' embrace. Plus just the idea of mixing a love story around the setting of Hiroshima and World War II is in itself shocking and a bit off-putting. He's definitely innovative in a way not even Truffaut's The 400 Blows can approach, but I found it in the end to be an exercise in style, someone with a very strong grasp on the technical aspect and impact of filmmaking but not necessarily the emotional components of it.
There's a separate reaction culled from each of the different sectors of the film. The atomic bomb documentary opening is effective and unnerving. The flashbacks to Elle's German affair likewise are successful in establishing the despair Elle has at the officers' death and her own horror at the memory slowly seeming to slip away from her. But the love affair doesn't result in anything more than a tie between the two, a connection between Hiroshima and France outside of the war and a link to allow her story to unfold. There are unconvincing parallels drawn between the German officer and Lui, but they don't fit and I wonder how well the parts of the film fit together as a whole.
To me, they didn't quite add up. So while I was enthralled in Resnais' touches on the film, the narrative of it kept me from really relishing it. I read that Leonard Maltin compared Hiroshima Mon Amour to The French New Wave's version of Birth of a Nation. Maybe it is. Maybe the techniques and innovations of this film went on to compliment many another pictures, but there's a lot of issues taken with Nation's narrative as well, regardless of the originality of it.
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