Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is a landmark of world cinema and a foundational French New Wave text. Resnais and Duras construct a radically non-linear, memory-saturated narrative that weaves personal trauma with collective historical catastrophe in a way virtually no film had attempted before — Novelty earns its top mark easily. The cinematography is exceptional: Resnais's intercutting of newsreel footage, museum exhibits, and intimate close-ups creates a fragmented visual language that mirrors the unreliability of memory and the unspeakability of atrocity. The plot — such as it is — is more of a sustained meditation than a conventional story, but its conceptual ambition and emotional depth justify a high mark even if its plotlessness may frustrate some. Acting is committed and earnest from Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, though the deliberately stylized, almost spoken-prose dialogue can feel distancing rather than emotionally immersive. The ending, with its elliptical naming ritual ('Tu es Hiroshima… Tu es Nevers'), is poetically resonant but deliberately withholding — above average yet not as formally dazzling as what precedes it.