Film Review: Hiroshima, Mon Amour

‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’ is essentially a film of parallels: the desire to forget against the urge to remember, the pain of war against the ache of love, the personal war against the war waging outside, the dissimilarity and similarity of the past and the present, the joint pleasure and pain of love, the effects of the same war in two different parts of the world. This film formed an integral part of the French New Wave, moving away from the classical style of filmmaking.

Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), a French actress in Hiroshima for a film on peace, and Lui (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect begin an explosive love affair that gets progressively contemplative as they examine the ripples created by the Hiroshima bombing and the resulting death and loss. Despite both of them being married, they embark on this affair where they start falling in love with each other.

Elle gradually reveals her painful past, when her first love was claimed by the World War, in France. As she feels the joy and pleasure of a new relationship, she continues to be haunted by her grisly experience and social ostracism in Nevers, France and is torn between the act of remembering and the inevitability of oblivion.

French director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras have engineered a deliberative tale told through a tapestry of images, traipsing between the past and the present to convey the sense of loss and the shifting time passages in a beautiful and innovative way. A series of documentary and news reel footage establishes the roles of memory and oblivion. The film moves at a slow pace and could have been a little shorter, yet with the sheer artistic rendering and the sleek story-telling, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Cinematography by Sacha Vierney is immaculate in black and white with smooth camera movements, leading us back and forth into time. Editing is splendid as it harnesses the avant-garde style. The musical score by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco is evocative.

The performances of both Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada are admirable, laced with subtlety, depth and just the right amount of emotion.




It’s interesting to note that their names are simply ‘Elle’ and ‘Lui’ which is French for ‘She’ and ‘Him’, since it exhibits something that is extremely personal and yet something that can happen to anyone at anytime.

“Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?”, asks Elle. A statement like that is succinct in making its point, yet never provides any answers. The importance attached to reminiscences is a powerful but not overpowering presence in the film. We want to hold onto memories, no matter how tragic and painful, but alas, as life would have it, forgetting is inevitable. Tragedy is something that we all strive to forget yet it is imperative to remember too.

This film, despite being made in 1959, is very much relevant today, reminding us about the ghastly whirlpool that is war. We’re hard pressed to find a film like this nowadays, an artistic platter that can be both delectable and contemplative.

Sequelism

Originality seems to have been declared an endangered species. Alas, about 70 percent of the movies released this year have a positive integer as its suffix. Summer seems to be the ideal time to unleash these harmless hi jinks to a key demographic of hungry, ennui ridden kids and adults alike. But what I fear most about the unhealthy practice of Sequelism is that it’s rendering true cinema obsolete. With movies that are decked up with pretty people and scant storylines, who’s gonna complain? That’s what audiences what, isn’t it?
For instance, the experience of sitting through The Hangover 2 was akin to having a bad bhel puri at Juhu Beach. It’s merely a hangover of the very first Hangover, again a film too banal to even worth talking about. Films like these manoeuvre their way to the audience under the guise of looking like a funky play on concepts like smartness and fun. However, it’s just another hackneyed yarn coughed up to sell, sell and sell. Frankly I’m weary of looking at the newspaper and seeing a dissonant symphony of films running in theatres.
It’s astonishing just how prosaic a film can get, only to observe that it makes an equally dire film look rather appetizing. This year, The Hangover 2 made Transformers look like Citizen Kane.
In another case, James Bond seems to be diagnosed with a Benjamin Button complex: with each successive movie, Bond becomes younger (and blonder). With franchises like X-Men, Spider-Man, Superman and Batman, the names alone manage to entice congregations to theatre halls.
Once upon a time Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Narnia were strictly literal but now have superb on-screen potential. Don’t even get me started on that insipid Twilight series. Films like these roam the district of ‘been-there-done-that’, bringing nothing new to the table, yet being marketed to give the impression otherwise.
Whatever happened to quality cinema built with a robust framework, complex characters, palatable storylines, breath-taking cinematography and inventive surge of storytelling? And what’s with the obsession for 3-D? Just because ‘Avatar’ did extremely well doesn’t make it appropriate or even sane to cash in on the epidemic. A remake of The Great Gatsby in 3-D is scheduled for release next year. I mean, The Great Gatsby and 3-D in the same sentence doesn’t sound particularly savoury. However people might be curious enough to actually check what all the noise is about. See, that’s what I’m talking about. Curiosity itself proves a noxious weapon.
‘Inception’, however, is a frighteningly brilliant display of creativity, which shows that stories like this haven’t died out so far. But how many more of these ordeals will we have to sift through to get a film that shows more technique than trite? I guess Sequelism derives its MO from everyday life. Not unlike the experience of going to the same restaurant every week and ordering the same dish every single time or asking for a second round of blueberry cheesecake. I guess art imitates life.
I don’t suppose Hollywood studios pay much attention to pleas like mine. What matters most to them is the ‘dough’, not the depth.