Hiroshima Mon Amour

I discovered Marguerite Duras at the impressionable age of 20. A friend recommended her Four Novels, a book of four short novellas. I devoured them, read “Moderato Cantabile” several times and tried to adapt it to film in my last year of film school – a disaster – my passion far outweighed my skill, but that’s another story.

I watched Hiroshima Mon Amour last night. It was Alain Resnais’ first feature film and Marguerite Duras’ first script. It was also the movie that sent me to film school. I’d been living in a yoga ashram in Cambridge for a year, meditating and doing yoga twice a day. My attention had begun to wander so I signed up for a Film Appreciation course at Boston University. I don’t know why I chose Hiroshima Mon Amour for my final paper, but it was playing at one of the cinemas in Harvard Square and I watched it daily and immersed myself in any book I could find about Duras or Resnais. By the time I finished my paper, I had decided I wanted to make films, not write about them.

When the first images came on the screen last night, it all came back. The anonymous bodies of the French woman and her Japanese lover covered in ash, then sweat; documentary footage of wounded, bleeding bodies after the bomb and Duras’ poetic narration circling in on itself, the cyclical narrative of trauma, fragmented and moving back in time until the full story emerges of the French woman and her German lover, murdered during the war. The Holocaust and Hiroshima exposed, love and war made intimate in the faces of a French woman and a Japanese man in an empty cafe. Impossible to look away. It’s lost nothing in translation, as captivating now as it was when I saw it in Harvard Square in 1973. The Viet Nam War was my reference point then, the only war I knew.

Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada in Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959