Hiroshima Mon Amour Is Back, but with Far Less Power

by Bruce Chadwick

Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News. Mr. Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.

Rialto Pictures has just re-released the classic 1959 black and white film Hiroshima Mon Amour that tells the story of two lovers who meet in Hiroshima, Japan, 14 years after the city was practically wiped out by the dropping of the atomic bomb by the Americans at the end of World War II. The movie is once again presented as an anti-war film and, as always, a warning to the world that atomic weapons must never be used again.

They say that great films stand the test of time; Hiroshima Mon Amour does not.

When the sub-titled French film was made in 1959, the world was at the height of the Cold War, worried that extreme foreign policy, or just a slip of someone’s finger on the nuclear button, would start the final nuclear conflagration. The Russians had recently developed the hydrogen bomb, there was a much publicized arms race to see which nation had the most nuclear warheads and missiles and huge attack systems were being perfected by both the United States and Russia. The whole planet lived in nuclear fear. The movie then was a great success. It keyed in on the ghastly memory of the mammoth Hiroshima blast that killed nearly 200,000 people and maimed thousands for life.

Today, 23 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race has pretty much subsided and the fear of a nuclear holocaust has diminished substantially. We fear nuclear devices made by terrorists, not countries. The sting of Hiroshima Mon Amour is gone, although the tragic legacy and incalculable sorrow of the bombing of the city lingers both in film and memory.

The main problem with Hiroshima now, as in 1959, when it was hailed as a French New Wave masterpiece, is that there is very little plot to the film; it is all talk. A married Japanese architect, whose family was wiped out in August, 1945, by the atomic bomb, meets a married French actress in the city to make a movie. They fall into a torrid romance and each has to decide whether or not to leave their spouse and live in Hiroshima. They talk and talk and talk, and then talk some more. It is tedious, really slow moving.

The heat of the film’s atomic footage, as scorching now as in 1959, comes early, when, as the lovers ramble on, we see flashbacks to the attack on Hiroshima, with vivid film footage of the post atomic bomb survival efforts and recreations of the attack by filmmakers in the 1950s. There are long, wide lens shots of the annihilated city that are heart-stopping. It is gripping and haunting – terrifying. It stops there, though. Throughout the rest of the movie there are references to the attack, but not much more footage. Hiroshima is presented as a rebuilt city with dreams of a great future, despite its historic past. The love story then kicks in but it goes nowhere.

Hiroshima Mon Amour was important in 1959 because of its historical status. It was one of the first major films about the atomic bombing of the Japanese city. It was played at art houses and universities for years. Now, though, more than fifty years after its original release and nearly 70 years after the bombing (and the destruction of Nagasaki shortly afterwards), the movie has lost its intensity. It is an historical film and a signpost from the past, but it is little more than that now.

The acting by the two stars of the film, Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, is quite good, and the direction by Alain Resnais is fine. Screenwriter Marguerite Duras’ (nominated for an Oscar) script is slow but solid. Producer Anatole Dauman’s work is well told and there is sense of romance to it, especially in the very first scene, when we meet the two star crossed lovers in bed and covered, it appears, with ashes. The scenes of 1959 Hiroshima at night reflect a reborn city and reborn country, and perhaps a reborn world. Hiroshima, the film says, has made it back, and so has the planet. The message is very low key, though.

Hiroshima Mon Amour is an historic film that seems stuck in history and left in the mist today.

The national film schedule: November 7-9,The Belcourt in Nashville, Tenn., November 7, Coral Gables Arts Center, Coral Gables, Fla., November 14, the Landmark Ritz at the Belcourt in Philadelphia, Pa., November 15, Cinema St. Louis in St. Louis, Missouri, November 28 at the Jean Cocteau Cinema, Santa e. N.M. and December 5 at the Cinema 21, in Portland. Ore. More will come.