Hiroshima Mon Amour

When I reviewed Hiroshima Mon Amour a few years ago, I wrote, “To appreciate the fuss and fury that greeted Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour on its first appearance, it’s necessary to get into a kind of 1959 mindset. In particular, the 1959 mindset of the Cahiers du Cinema group, who were looking for new type of film. They found it with Resnais’ movie, which virtually defined the French New Wave. … And it’s pretty much all here in this one film: the deceptively simple story of a brief encounter between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) on location in Hiroshima and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). And it all—as technique—still seems reasonably fresh, if no longer startlingly so. Unfortunately, Hiroshima is also the quintessential French art film, with everything that implies, meaning that every parody of pretentious French cinema (you know: where two characters say ‘oui’ and ‘non’ and nothing else for minutes on end) also stems from this movie.” Seeing it again for this screening, I find that that hasn’t changed, nor have my reservations about how the film plays today. To see the full review go to: http://www.mountainx.com/movies/review/hiroshima.php