The Love Affair of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" Collapses in on Itself

Hiroshima Mon Amour is a dreamy, hazy film about histories, both personal and literal, complicating people's lives and coming to to term with those histories. The biggest history factoring in here is World War II, and specifically the nuclear bombing of the city of Hiroshima.14 years later lovers, one French (Emmanuelle Riva) and one Japanese (Eiji Okada), have an affair, at Hiroshima, in which the past weighs heavily on their tenuous affair.

The film, on a descriptive level, is essentially a straightforward narrative about lovers who have less than a day left to determine if they continue with their affair. But in the hands of director Alain Resnais there's all sorts of excessive arthouse touches, some gorgeous --  there are some stunning shots of the city itself and some haunting flashback scenes in France -- and some unnecessary. While at the time, as part of the French New Wave, the film's stylistic and narrative choices -- non-linearity, flashbacks -- were groundbreaking, now they feel slightly pretentious and overdone. While the romance is paradoxically both over and under explained in ways that make the whole ordeal seem unreal and strange.

Grade: B-