Product: Hiroshima mon amour [VHS] (1960)
Rating: 5.0
A haunting, yet uplifting love story
An extroadinarily creative, haunting love story of a French woman who comes to the city where the first atomic bomb was dropped and has an affair with a Japanese businessman. No pretensions that it will last (he is married, and loves his wife), and in fact she delivers one of the most memorable lines I have ever heard in summing it up (the translation of which is "All I wanted was an inconsolable memory.") The film explores the themes of cultural conflict (he keeps telling her, the Westerner who he thinks is incapable of understanding, you saw nothing at Hiroshima), the devastating effect of the bomb, and the more universal theme of simultaneously loving one's spouse yet falling passionately in love with a stranger. The film may be slightly pretentious in the way some French films are, with the deliberately sparse and cryptic dialogue, but in spite of that this is a beautiful, strange, compelling film.