Product: Hiroshima mon amour [VHS] (1960)
Rating: 5.0
Painful, powerful and unsettling
After sitting through a screening of the film, I am left choking from the emotional turmoil the woman has suffered and how the end of the film predicts the future for both characters. For a few short hours, the two characters are intense lovers -- both physical and spiritual, and the performers couldn't be more perfect. The French woman in the film keeps trying to avoid, then not avoid her present Japanese lover while revealing her past to him. He is the only person with whom she shares her painful memory of having fallen in love with a German soldier during WWII, and with her present lover, she realizes she will undergo the same desperation and loneliness after they have separated. We know little of his character (a flaw in the film) except for the fact that he is very much in love with her. Images of human beings devastated by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima are symbolic of the two lovers: the lovers are also destroyed by outside, uncontrollable elements. Reminiscent of Graham Greene's "End of the Affair," as well as other films about love among the ruins.