Hiroshima, mon amour

I have no idea why I hadn't seen this movie before. I feel like an idiot, always telling my people, "You haven't lived if you haven't seen this movie!" because I must not have lived myself.

During the viewing, I constantly compared the film to Shadows and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad, two other experimental films directed by Alain Resnais. The trio of films concerns trauma, and the aftermath of trauma. Shadows and Fog is a shattering documentary-poem that discusses the holocaust while panning over photos of the atrocities intercut with the present-day sites, already disappearing under fresh greenery.

Last Year at Marienbad, a baroque narrative, is as hollow as Shadows and Fog is laden with endless meaning. The Holocaust will always be the heaviest weight in cinematic depiction (and the easiest Oscar win), whereas Last Year at Marienbad concerns a mere encounter that may or may not have happened two the two characters the year before. Last Year often seems as though it will become laden with meaning, but that never happens. The dialogue is oblique and repetitive, constantly referring and accusing while relating little humanity, always hopelessly general, no matter how particularly they revisit each detail of their encounter: the color of her dress, his way of standing by a statue, a walk through the gardens. I think of Last Year at Marienbad as a wanky cinematic exercise that doesn't quite stand the test of time, except for wanky cinema nerds like myself who enjoy killing themselves reading Deleuze's interpretation and re-watching the film.

Hiroshima, mon amour seems to straddle both these films. The narrative, while oblique, is sensible: two lovers meet in Hiroshima. Both are laden with trauma: the Japanese man is, like any Japanese at the time, scarred by Hiroshima, emotionally and spiritually, if not physically; the French woman is wounded by the death of her German lover during the liberation. We witness the now-trademark Resnais technique of layering poetic musings over montages of places laden with trauma. I experienced real anxiety as these lovers met and parted, met and parted through the night. They are both "happily married" and I had no idea what I wanted the outcome to be--is there any "happy" outcome for such a film? I doubt it. No ending is entirely happy for anyone who has survived such horror as Hiroshima, an unspeakable loss.

My favorite thing about the film is probably how the synecdochic theme is wrapped-up in the last few lines of dialogue. Throughout, he describes his experience of her in relation to her birthplace, Nevers, and she describes her experience of him in relation to what she knows of Hiroshima, what she remembers of 1945. In the last few moments of the film, she says, "Hiroshima. Your name is Hiroshima." "My name is Hiroshima. And you, your name is Nevers. Nevers, in France."

Those last lines were just so good! They re-iterated how these characters will never be able to separate themselves from the synecdoche of their tragedy: he will always, in a way, be the horror of Hiroshima; she will always, in a way, be a bout of madness in Nevers.

So now I can say I've lived because I've seen this movie. I hope this kind of humbling happens often.