Resnais started Hiroshima Mon Amour as a documentary (he had made shorts and documentaries before but this is his debut) and then he integrates that into a brilliant blend of an almost David Lean-like Brief Encounter or Visconti-like Le Notti Bianche– two-hander romance (two lovers, heavy dialogue, short time span – this is 2-3 days)
It’s not exactly Bergman or Varda’s shot in La Pointe Courte– but a magificent frame here using depth of field and character blocking
It starts with a distinct jazz score and dust, perhaps ash, poetically falling on posing naked bodies and then the dueling voice-overs come in with “you know nothing”, disorienting, conflicting— Resnais is going for sensation and mood here- not for coherence or traditional narrative
It starts with a distinct jazz score and dust, perhaps ash, poetically falling on posing naked bodies and then the dueling voice-overs come in with “you know nothing”, disorienting, conflicting— Resnais is going for sensation and mood here- not for coherence or traditional narrative
The opening 16 minute montage medley is important to film history—lyrical– it is brilliant—this is the documentary section and Resnais fragments or flickers in the shots of the bodies of our two voices to ground you in a feature fiction film as the camera has rolling tracking shots (often establishing shots of a museum, hospital in Hiroshima). He’s melding this tragedy and these two characters and fusing the two cities (Nevers in France and Hiroshima in Japan where the film is mostly set) with these two embodiments of those cities in the form of these characters (Emmanuelle Riva and Elji Okada)
The opening 16 minute montage medley is important to film history—lyrical– it is brilliant
this is the documentary section and Resnais fragments or flickers in the shots of the bodies of our two voices to ground you in a feature fiction film as the camera has rolling tracking shots (often establishing shots of a museum, hospital in Hiroshima).
He’s melding this tragedy and these two characters and fusing the two cities (Nevers in France and Hiroshima in Japan where the film is mostly set) with these two embodiments of those cities in the form of these characters (Emmanuelle Riva and Elji Okada)
The remaining 70-80 minutes of the film is told through them—a meditation on pain, trauma, memory— Resnais is a forerunner in the use (incredibly prevalent since 1959 when this film came out) jump-cut editing to carry us the viewers to the terrible lives of their tragedy via flashback (shot silently here carried by voice-over). I’d always sort of attributed this to Midnight Cowboy and the past of Jon Voight’s Joe Buck character and how Schlesinger uses it—but this is 10 year before
An absolute jaw-dropper frame at 51 minutes of the two at the restaurant
An absolute jaw-dropper frame at 51 minutes of the two at the restaurant
It also seems improbable that Godard didn’t see this film (the year before Breathless) – Breathless, of course, revolutionized the jump cut editing technique but I see it here. Lynn Ramsay’s hermetically-sealed, frozen characters in a post-trauma state seem influenced by this film as does Kiarostami’s melding of documentary and fiction and those lines blurring. The cutaway editing and those rhythms also feel like an influence of Ozu’s trademark pillow shots (pioneered long before Resnais).
At 59 minutes a long monologue by Riva— the tale of the death of her first love, devastating, impressive acting. We’d get another display by Riva (certainly should be the best female performance of 1959—sorry Marilyn Monroe but I’ve changed my mind) at 71 minutes with her confession in the mirror. The confession isn’t to her husband, but to her lost love during the war and it is not for cheating, it is for telling her story which she considers much more important
Riva certainly is the best female performance of 1959—sorry Marilyn Monroe but I’ve changed my mind
In Riva’s flashback we get a glimpse of her shaved head and it’s hard not to think of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc
At 66 minutes another stunner of a frame outside the window of the same Tea Room Restaurant
At 66 minutes another stunner of a frame outside the window of the same Tea Room Restaurant
A powerfully edited sequence at 75 minutes as Riva is walking the streets at night and Resnais intermixes shots of the two cities
A powerfully edited sequence at 75 minutes as Riva is walking the streets at night and Resnais intermixes shots of the two cities
A Must-See top 5 of the year quality film – an essential film in the history of editing an aesthetic choice
Not sure if this is kismet or what, but I am working with this film right now and have been debating the best way to pick a bone I have with you over Resnais for some time now. Is this the beginning of a Resnais study? I’m excited about the prospect of that… and encouraged by the impressive big step in the right direction I’m seeing here with Hiroshima mon Amour (not quite where I am yet, but much closer).
By the by, I can confirm for you that Godard did indeed see this before making Breathless. There is a published Cahiers du Cinema conversation from 1959 with Godard, Rivette, Rohmer and a few other Cahier critics where they more or less agree that this film is the exception to the rule about abhorring “literary” cinema. They place Resnais in the lineage of Faulkner (literary), Stravinsky (music), and Eisenstein (film) as someone revolutionizing the form and more or less agree that it is a history shaking masterwork. Anyway, that’s worth checking out if you can find it. The July 1959 issue of Cahiers.
@Matt Harris. Spooky! haha. Yeah so I saw it Sunday night, Marienbad on Tuesday and both have been living in my brain here all week. I may even move Hiroshima Mon Amour up a half-grade more. It is the start of a Resnais study (though some of his work is notoriously hard to find). I’ve been wanting to revisit it for years and to put it simply (especially with Marienbad–) my cinematic reading level wasn’t where it is now…. I wasn’t ready for it
The main thing keeping me from calling Hiroshima a masterpiece is the long sequences after that dazzling opening where we really don’t have much going on aside from the jump cut flashbacks (you may disagree with that or you may imply that the jump cut flashbacks are enough). Perhaps a third viewing with prove me wrong.
Thank you for confirming that Godard saw this before making Breathless. You can feel it. Interesting on the Cahier piece. Thanks for sharing. I haven’t read it but a similar comparison is in the Esquire archives here https://classic.esquire.com/article/1960/9/1/films . snip of it below—maybe he lifted it from Cahier— Eisenstein comes up, Joyce is plugged in for Faulkner… I’m not an expert enough in other artforms to comment but I like it. I did try to read Ulysses (reading level again) once and loved the words and sentences but hated the book if that makes sense (which it didn’t to me). haha. I see that here.
“Here — for the first time since Eisenstein — we have a cinematic intelligence so quick, so subtle, so original, so at once passionate and sophisticated that it can be compared with Joyce, with Picasso, with Berg and Bartók and Stravinksy.”
I’ll be working with Marienbad next, so I look forward to seeing how they differ and how they complement each other. I think the only section of Hiroshima you could highlight “where we really don’t have much going on” is the roughly 20-minute stretch from when they leave the hotel 20 minutes in until they arrive at his house nearly 40 minutes in. That stretch establishes a lot of themes and narrative elements that are important going forward but isn’t the film’s highwater mark from an aesthetic perspective.
Once we get into the patterned jump cuts in and out of the memories that mark the next 30-35 minutes of the film both at his house and at the Tea Room, I believe we are in very rarified air formally and stylistically, and Riva’s performance is astonishing, highlighted by some truly incredible closeups. And then the 15 minutes toward the end of them wandering the streets of Hiroshima, interpolated by her memories of the streets of Nevers, is incredible stuff too.
To me, it’s the utterly distinctive nature of the ‘flashbacks’ above almost anything else, that sets this film apart. They’re not really flashbacks in the conventional sense, but eruptions of memory into the present moment and I can’t think of many examples of this kind of technique. It’s interesting that in the scene at his house, they jump cut into the memories, but dissolve out of them, until the end when she begins to get lost in them and then they cut in and out. And that cutting in and out is maintained through the rest of the film. It’s also evocative how the sound of the present is all that is heard in the past, with the possible exception of one howl of misery.
@Matt Harris— thank you. Really appreciate the comment and this is a nice addition to the page. You may be very well correct as far as the indistinct stretch I spoke about. It may not run as long as I noted. Thanks for the help.
I guess it’s fitting that this film about memory is still lingering in my mind 10+ days after rewatching it. The flatter scenes have faded and the truly exceptional sequences live on and I’ll share with you that as recent as a few days ago when I finished my writing page on Mon oncle d’Amérique— I moved Hiroshima Mon Amour up to a MS/MP film.
@Matt Harris– had a chance to read this. thank you. All of it is excellent. “Thus ends one of the most daring sequences in film history, a dense thirteen minutes of imagery, music, and dialogue. I think it’s hard for us today to grasp just how jolting this opening felt in 1959.”
I love the comparisons to Varda near the end as well. I brought up a shot composition comparison to Varda’s film but Bordwell (as he usually does) goes further. La Pointe Courte is a film I ran into finally in March 2019 and it has stuck with me.
You made a great point about how the characters embodied the cities of where they are from. To me, this film was a poem of imagery. With this poetry, the film was able to transcend a story about two people and their experience and call out to humanity for peace and an end to nuclear war in the name of love.
Hey, so I know I haven’t posted here much in a while, I got to a point where I wasn’t watching a whole lot of movies, like days and weeks would go by without watching a film while I focused on other parts of life and so I didn’t have anything to say or that I wanted to talk about. But I saw Hiroshima mon amour again recently and there were a few things that I wanted to talk about.
Formally, Resnais establishes during the film that Riva is Nevers and Okada is Hiroshima, he doesn’t ever give us their real names as they are tangential to their identities as these two cities, they have no importance. Whenever we are in Nevers in France, we are always in 1944/1945 during WW2, as Riva (who is Nevers) is unable to forget the memory of her lost love, and while he was alive she viewed Nevers as a gorgeous place of rolling hills and forest paths that she would ride down when going to see her love, but after his death we only see it as her prison, we are almost always inside the cellar she is trapped in after his death. Compare that to whenever we are in Hiroshima, where we are only ever in 1959, this is because Okada does not have the issues with dark memories of his past that Riva has, his city was blown to smithereens by the atomic bomb and yet he resiliently stands proud, constantly looking forward to the future ahead of him and, not needing any help himself, he gives himself away to Riva so she can use him to guard her from her past and finally find the resolution and closure she needs with her lover by acting as and pretending to be him.
I remember when I watched this film for the first time I was annoyed that Okada did not get his own narrative to tell us about so we could get an insight into Okada as well but now I know that Resnais made the right choice by making the relationship an asymmetric one and by restricting the trauma to Riva, Resnais wanted to explore the fundamental differences between these characters that do not clash but rather allow the two of them to complete eachother, and if Okada had been similar in disposition and had memories that will not vacate his mind the film would not be as good. The film needs the two to be fundamentally different as if they were the same than it would not make sense for Riva to tell her story of her past, it is the first time in 14 years since 1945 that she has not been in France and she knows that Okada is someone who will listen to her and understand her perspective without judging her as he shows his interest in her to be genuine and compassionate, he is not French and would therefore not be offended by what she has to say, and in the unlikely case he does, she decides she is flying back to Paris the next day so why not tell it to this man who will not be following her back home? Beyond all this, we never even see Okada during WW2 as opposed to Riva who we see in both 1945 and 1959, and that is because who he was then is not relevant as not only is this really Riva’s story to tell, who she was in 1945 still has major repercussions for who she is now, Okada was not really all that affected by the bombing in 1945, it did not send him into the same spiral of sadness and melancholy that she experiences and judging by their tones of voice in the opening montage, she arguably sounds more affected by the bombing than he does, she needs to vacate her demons but he has none of his own that need the same.
It’s also interesting how the first time Riva is alone in the film, after she and Okada leave the cafe and she tells him she is going to leave Hiroshima so he goes off on his own, she meanders about in the hallway of her hotel frustrated about how she has nobody to speak to, he was the outlet for all of her fear and her anger and her hatred and her resentment over the way her life has turned out while they spoke and so she finally has to go over to the mirror of her bathroom just to talk to somebody, anybody even if it’s herself in the mirror because she cannot hold it in that she feels guilty about revealing her past that she shared so intimately with her one true love even if she had to do it. Even though she hides her memories at the beginning of the film, she pretends not to be bothered by anything except for hearing the word “Nevers” to the point of making jokes about how she only felt hate for so long after the war ended that she could have made a living out of hate, Riva is confronted with the fact that the memories aren’t gone or even distant, and that absolutely nothing she has done in the past 15 years has compared to her time with her lover enough to displace that from the place it occupies in her mind, nothing but coming to Hiroshima and meeting Okada.
One of the most iconic sequences in the film obviously comes as Resnais intercuts the footage of the two cities against eachother when Riva and Okada separately walk through the streets of Hiroshima, but the footage of the two cities is more than just reels of film, it is the two of them, whenever Resnais throws up shots of Nevers we know we are looking at Riva and whenever he throws up shots of Hiroshima we know it is Okada, and even though the cities look different, they are still joined so intimately by the connection their human counterparts have made.
I guess it would be a bit disingenuous if I didn’t mention that up until the last 20 or so minutes after they both leave the cafe I was probably feeling a HR or HR/MS on this, obviously it wasn’t the first time I had seen the film but as good as it is, it is not until the very end that everything is wholly tied together as well as when we truly start to get reeled into some of that Resnais magic with the slow tracking shots as well as the move to long shots after the abundance of closeups beforehand characterized formally in the absence of the dialogue-heavy nature of the film leading up to that point, there’s much less dialogue in the film towards the end relative to before. I do think this one is a masterpiece as it is but maybe not a giant one, only time will tell.
I guess another thing I could say is that Resnais is obviously an admirer of Hitchcock and to some extent that is reflected here, beyond the fact that Resnais infuses the suspense into every scene of the film, you get the same sort of Hitchcock narrative of a sort of romantic thriller with two people who have never met eachother meet and attempt to form some kind of a relationship juxtaposed against some strange event taking place around them, like the robberies in To Catch a Thief or the Nazi cell in Brazil in Notorious, or in spite of secrets buried deep in the past, like Laurence Olivier’s confession about Rebecca’s death in Rebecca or the truth behind Kim Novak’s first “death” in Vertigo. Also, in many Hitchcock films the locale is as important to the film as anything else, such as the French Riviera in To Catch a Thief, San Francisco in Vertigo, the Scottish Highlands in The 39 Steps and Morocco in The Man Who Knew Too Much, (not to mention the use of set pieces on a near-constant basis) here it is the same as Resnais chooses an important setting from modern history, Hiroshima, destroyed by the atomic bomb, and this location has an incalculable effect on Riva’s and Okada’s personalities and attitudes, particularly with one being a native of the area and the other a foreigner from all the way across the globe. Riva has as much trapped baggage as any of the more unhinged leads from Hitchcock’s later period, especially Anthony Perkins from Psycho the year after this; she reminds me a little of Joan Fontaine in Rebecca if she were the one keeping secrets from Laurence Olivier instead of the other way around. Beyond Riva, Okada has a similar obsessive longing to know who Riva is and to be let into her life – he constantly pressures her to tell more and jumps in joy upon being informed he is the only person in the world she has told about herself – and this really recalls Marnie, a film that I would argue is directly inspired by this one, with Tippi Hedren’s Marnie being a troubled woman who refuses to tie herself to anyone in any way, no friends, poor relationship with her mother, because of a traumatic incident in her past that strips her of her free will by predetermining every choice she makes, much like Riva in this film, until she is forcibly taken by Sean Connery who stops at nothing to smash through every lock controlling her mind with the utmost brute force, knowing full well from his weeks of studying her before approaching her that there is no other option, much like Okada. That’s the gist of it but there’s probably a long essay to be written comparing Hiroshima mon amour and Marnie as well as Resnais and Hitchcock as a whole. They have the same perspective on the impact of catharsis.
I really like this film, I hope anybody who happens to come across this enjoys it.
Not sure if this is kismet or what, but I am working with this film right now and have been debating the best way to pick a bone I have with you over Resnais for some time now. Is this the beginning of a Resnais study? I’m excited about the prospect of that… and encouraged by the impressive big step in the right direction I’m seeing here with Hiroshima mon Amour (not quite where I am yet, but much closer).
By the by, I can confirm for you that Godard did indeed see this before making Breathless. There is a published Cahiers du Cinema conversation from 1959 with Godard, Rivette, Rohmer and a few other Cahier critics where they more or less agree that this film is the exception to the rule about abhorring “literary” cinema. They place Resnais in the lineage of Faulkner (literary), Stravinsky (music), and Eisenstein (film) as someone revolutionizing the form and more or less agree that it is a history shaking masterwork. Anyway, that’s worth checking out if you can find it. The July 1959 issue of Cahiers.
@Matt Harris. Spooky! haha. Yeah so I saw it Sunday night, Marienbad on Tuesday and both have been living in my brain here all week. I may even move Hiroshima Mon Amour up a half-grade more. It is the start of a Resnais study (though some of his work is notoriously hard to find). I’ve been wanting to revisit it for years and to put it simply (especially with Marienbad–) my cinematic reading level wasn’t where it is now…. I wasn’t ready for it
The main thing keeping me from calling Hiroshima a masterpiece is the long sequences after that dazzling opening where we really don’t have much going on aside from the jump cut flashbacks (you may disagree with that or you may imply that the jump cut flashbacks are enough). Perhaps a third viewing with prove me wrong.
Thank you for confirming that Godard saw this before making Breathless. You can feel it. Interesting on the Cahier piece. Thanks for sharing. I haven’t read it but a similar comparison is in the Esquire archives here https://classic.esquire.com/article/1960/9/1/films . snip of it below—maybe he lifted it from Cahier— Eisenstein comes up, Joyce is plugged in for Faulkner… I’m not an expert enough in other artforms to comment but I like it. I did try to read Ulysses (reading level again) once and loved the words and sentences but hated the book if that makes sense (which it didn’t to me). haha. I see that here.
“Here — for the first time since Eisenstein — we have a cinematic intelligence so quick, so subtle, so original, so at once passionate and sophisticated that it can be compared with Joyce, with Picasso, with Berg and Bartók and Stravinksy.”
I’ll be working with Marienbad next, so I look forward to seeing how they differ and how they complement each other. I think the only section of Hiroshima you could highlight “where we really don’t have much going on” is the roughly 20-minute stretch from when they leave the hotel 20 minutes in until they arrive at his house nearly 40 minutes in. That stretch establishes a lot of themes and narrative elements that are important going forward but isn’t the film’s highwater mark from an aesthetic perspective.
Once we get into the patterned jump cuts in and out of the memories that mark the next 30-35 minutes of the film both at his house and at the Tea Room, I believe we are in very rarified air formally and stylistically, and Riva’s performance is astonishing, highlighted by some truly incredible closeups. And then the 15 minutes toward the end of them wandering the streets of Hiroshima, interpolated by her memories of the streets of Nevers, is incredible stuff too.
To me, it’s the utterly distinctive nature of the ‘flashbacks’ above almost anything else, that sets this film apart. They’re not really flashbacks in the conventional sense, but eruptions of memory into the present moment and I can’t think of many examples of this kind of technique. It’s interesting that in the scene at his house, they jump cut into the memories, but dissolve out of them, until the end when she begins to get lost in them and then they cut in and out. And that cutting in and out is maintained through the rest of the film. It’s also evocative how the sound of the present is all that is heard in the past, with the possible exception of one howl of misery.
Anyways, it’s a masterpiece in my book.
@Matt Harris— thank you. Really appreciate the comment and this is a nice addition to the page. You may be very well correct as far as the indistinct stretch I spoke about. It may not run as long as I noted. Thanks for the help.
I guess it’s fitting that this film about memory is still lingering in my mind 10+ days after rewatching it. The flatter scenes have faded and the truly exceptional sequences live on and I’ll share with you that as recent as a few days ago when I finished my writing page on Mon oncle d’Amérique— I moved Hiroshima Mon Amour up to a MS/MP film.
Don’t know if you happened upon this on your own, but Bordwell has an excellent and illuminating piece about Hiroshima Mon Amour on his blog.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2018/09/25/on-the-criterion-channel-five-reasons-why-hiroshima-mon-amour-still-matters/
@Matt Harris– I did not see this. I’ll be adding this to my list to read. Hopefully soon. Thank you.
@Matt Harris– had a chance to read this. thank you. All of it is excellent. “Thus ends one of the most daring sequences in film history, a dense thirteen minutes of imagery, music, and dialogue. I think it’s hard for us today to grasp just how jolting this opening felt in 1959.”
I love the comparisons to Varda near the end as well. I brought up a shot composition comparison to Varda’s film but Bordwell (as he usually does) goes further. La Pointe Courte is a film I ran into finally in March 2019 and it has stuck with me.
You made a great point about how the characters embodied the cities of where they are from. To me, this film was a poem of imagery. With this poetry, the film was able to transcend a story about two people and their experience and call out to humanity for peace and an end to nuclear war in the name of love.
@Donovan– thank you for the comment here. Much appreciated
Hey, so I know I haven’t posted here much in a while, I got to a point where I wasn’t watching a whole lot of movies, like days and weeks would go by without watching a film while I focused on other parts of life and so I didn’t have anything to say or that I wanted to talk about. But I saw Hiroshima mon amour again recently and there were a few things that I wanted to talk about.
Formally, Resnais establishes during the film that Riva is Nevers and Okada is Hiroshima, he doesn’t ever give us their real names as they are tangential to their identities as these two cities, they have no importance. Whenever we are in Nevers in France, we are always in 1944/1945 during WW2, as Riva (who is Nevers) is unable to forget the memory of her lost love, and while he was alive she viewed Nevers as a gorgeous place of rolling hills and forest paths that she would ride down when going to see her love, but after his death we only see it as her prison, we are almost always inside the cellar she is trapped in after his death. Compare that to whenever we are in Hiroshima, where we are only ever in 1959, this is because Okada does not have the issues with dark memories of his past that Riva has, his city was blown to smithereens by the atomic bomb and yet he resiliently stands proud, constantly looking forward to the future ahead of him and, not needing any help himself, he gives himself away to Riva so she can use him to guard her from her past and finally find the resolution and closure she needs with her lover by acting as and pretending to be him.
I remember when I watched this film for the first time I was annoyed that Okada did not get his own narrative to tell us about so we could get an insight into Okada as well but now I know that Resnais made the right choice by making the relationship an asymmetric one and by restricting the trauma to Riva, Resnais wanted to explore the fundamental differences between these characters that do not clash but rather allow the two of them to complete eachother, and if Okada had been similar in disposition and had memories that will not vacate his mind the film would not be as good. The film needs the two to be fundamentally different as if they were the same than it would not make sense for Riva to tell her story of her past, it is the first time in 14 years since 1945 that she has not been in France and she knows that Okada is someone who will listen to her and understand her perspective without judging her as he shows his interest in her to be genuine and compassionate, he is not French and would therefore not be offended by what she has to say, and in the unlikely case he does, she decides she is flying back to Paris the next day so why not tell it to this man who will not be following her back home? Beyond all this, we never even see Okada during WW2 as opposed to Riva who we see in both 1945 and 1959, and that is because who he was then is not relevant as not only is this really Riva’s story to tell, who she was in 1945 still has major repercussions for who she is now, Okada was not really all that affected by the bombing in 1945, it did not send him into the same spiral of sadness and melancholy that she experiences and judging by their tones of voice in the opening montage, she arguably sounds more affected by the bombing than he does, she needs to vacate her demons but he has none of his own that need the same.
It’s also interesting how the first time Riva is alone in the film, after she and Okada leave the cafe and she tells him she is going to leave Hiroshima so he goes off on his own, she meanders about in the hallway of her hotel frustrated about how she has nobody to speak to, he was the outlet for all of her fear and her anger and her hatred and her resentment over the way her life has turned out while they spoke and so she finally has to go over to the mirror of her bathroom just to talk to somebody, anybody even if it’s herself in the mirror because she cannot hold it in that she feels guilty about revealing her past that she shared so intimately with her one true love even if she had to do it. Even though she hides her memories at the beginning of the film, she pretends not to be bothered by anything except for hearing the word “Nevers” to the point of making jokes about how she only felt hate for so long after the war ended that she could have made a living out of hate, Riva is confronted with the fact that the memories aren’t gone or even distant, and that absolutely nothing she has done in the past 15 years has compared to her time with her lover enough to displace that from the place it occupies in her mind, nothing but coming to Hiroshima and meeting Okada.
One of the most iconic sequences in the film obviously comes as Resnais intercuts the footage of the two cities against eachother when Riva and Okada separately walk through the streets of Hiroshima, but the footage of the two cities is more than just reels of film, it is the two of them, whenever Resnais throws up shots of Nevers we know we are looking at Riva and whenever he throws up shots of Hiroshima we know it is Okada, and even though the cities look different, they are still joined so intimately by the connection their human counterparts have made.
I guess it would be a bit disingenuous if I didn’t mention that up until the last 20 or so minutes after they both leave the cafe I was probably feeling a HR or HR/MS on this, obviously it wasn’t the first time I had seen the film but as good as it is, it is not until the very end that everything is wholly tied together as well as when we truly start to get reeled into some of that Resnais magic with the slow tracking shots as well as the move to long shots after the abundance of closeups beforehand characterized formally in the absence of the dialogue-heavy nature of the film leading up to that point, there’s much less dialogue in the film towards the end relative to before. I do think this one is a masterpiece as it is but maybe not a giant one, only time will tell.
I guess another thing I could say is that Resnais is obviously an admirer of Hitchcock and to some extent that is reflected here, beyond the fact that Resnais infuses the suspense into every scene of the film, you get the same sort of Hitchcock narrative of a sort of romantic thriller with two people who have never met eachother meet and attempt to form some kind of a relationship juxtaposed against some strange event taking place around them, like the robberies in To Catch a Thief or the Nazi cell in Brazil in Notorious, or in spite of secrets buried deep in the past, like Laurence Olivier’s confession about Rebecca’s death in Rebecca or the truth behind Kim Novak’s first “death” in Vertigo. Also, in many Hitchcock films the locale is as important to the film as anything else, such as the French Riviera in To Catch a Thief, San Francisco in Vertigo, the Scottish Highlands in The 39 Steps and Morocco in The Man Who Knew Too Much, (not to mention the use of set pieces on a near-constant basis) here it is the same as Resnais chooses an important setting from modern history, Hiroshima, destroyed by the atomic bomb, and this location has an incalculable effect on Riva’s and Okada’s personalities and attitudes, particularly with one being a native of the area and the other a foreigner from all the way across the globe. Riva has as much trapped baggage as any of the more unhinged leads from Hitchcock’s later period, especially Anthony Perkins from Psycho the year after this; she reminds me a little of Joan Fontaine in Rebecca if she were the one keeping secrets from Laurence Olivier instead of the other way around. Beyond Riva, Okada has a similar obsessive longing to know who Riva is and to be let into her life – he constantly pressures her to tell more and jumps in joy upon being informed he is the only person in the world she has told about herself – and this really recalls Marnie, a film that I would argue is directly inspired by this one, with Tippi Hedren’s Marnie being a troubled woman who refuses to tie herself to anyone in any way, no friends, poor relationship with her mother, because of a traumatic incident in her past that strips her of her free will by predetermining every choice she makes, much like Riva in this film, until she is forcibly taken by Sean Connery who stops at nothing to smash through every lock controlling her mind with the utmost brute force, knowing full well from his weeks of studying her before approaching her that there is no other option, much like Okada. That’s the gist of it but there’s probably a long essay to be written comparing Hiroshima mon amour and Marnie as well as Resnais and Hitchcock as a whole. They have the same perspective on the impact of catharsis.
I really like this film, I hope anybody who happens to come across this enjoys it.
@Zane- Great to hear from you again- and with an impressive write-up here- thank you for sharing.