Product: Hiroshima mon amour [VHS] (1960)
Rating: 5.0
Sleeping with the Enemy
"Hiroshima Mon Amour" is a groundbreaking French New Wave movie. It begins with the French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) passionately making love.... then it cuts to the horrors of the atomic bomb. The viewer goes from the boudoir's pleasures to war's pain. It's a daring,powerful,opening sequence, and probably not something likely to be seen in the movie theater nowadays,let alone an art house one."Hiroshima Mon Amour",Alan Resnais' masterpiece, has a non-linear sense of time. The French actress is in Japan in the '60s to make an antiwar film. Though she's married, she carries on a brief,passionate affair with a married Japanese architect. Not only does marriage divide them,but culture and the memories of war. The actress reminisces about her brief affair with a German soldier in Nevers (the name is fitting) during WWII. She is deeply pained and conflicted."Hiroshima Mon Amour" is a meditative movie about the nature of forbidden love. While "sleeping with the enemy" is used for titillation in recent films like Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book" and Ang Lee's "Lust Caution",Resnais sees the Frenchwoman's affair as a jumping-off point to look into its deeper implications. It brings a whole new meaning to the '60s motto "make love,not war."