Product: Hiroshima mon amour [VHS] (1960)
Rating: 5.0
The inaugural event of the French Nouvelle Vague
Godard anointed it "Faulkner meets Stravinsky". That should be enough of an evaluation. But if you insist...Hiroshima Mon Amour is equally beautiful and baffling. The challenge of the film is its narrative structure, which fluidly blends past and present through bursts of flashback. You might say that the form of the film is a cinematic attempt at capturing the mechanism of memory at work (who can really know if it was a successful attempt, memory is a subjective experience).Marguerite Duras' screenplay is chillingly spare, but a subtle beauty, Sacha Vierny's cinematography, with all its graceful tracking shots is the work of a master, and Emanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, the handsomely paired couple at the center are played with tenderness and sympathy, and eventually a bitter edge. Alain Resnais pulls them all together for a film that is something of a revolution.