Hiroshima Mon Amour - Criterion Collection | Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada

Hiroshima Mon Amour - Criterion Collection | Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada | "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" reflects image and sound, past and present; the actual and the remembered.

DVDs:

Hiroshima Mon Amou...

	Hiroshima Mon Amour - Criterion Collection Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada Criterion, 2003 average customer review:based on 60 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

When memory and reality get all mixed up

All about memory and forgetting and first-hand vs. second-hand knowledge. A French actress (played by Emmanuelle Riva) comes to Hiroshima to participate in a "peace" film; while there she meets a French-speaking Japanese man (Eiji Okada) and has a brief (one night) affair with him. She tells him the story of her life in France during the war, her love affair with a German soldier, his death, and her insane grief over him. Memory and reality get mixed up as she begins referring to Okada as her lost German lover.

Technically the movie employs a number of flashbacks as Riva, while in bed making love to Okada, tells him what she has seen and felt (about the A-bombing) during her visit to Hiroshima; Okada keeps telling her it's not the same as actually witnessing it. The movie drags a bit toward the end, as if the themes are all worked out and there's nowhere else to go - so it flounders. But it's a memorable movie experience all the same, even profound at times. Definitely worth a watch.

for more information click here

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" reflects image and sound, past and present; the actual and the remembered.

His film was a bit puzzling, but, at the same time, a compromise, a promise, a pledge to human society... It is too daring by its conventional moral standards, distinguished in the way it was done, written, made and executed... Alain Resnais does not neglect the blast of Hiroshima by wrapping it with a simple love-affair.
"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is about the fortitude of man, with its mental and physical power... Alain Resnais and his writer-collaborator Marguerite Duras combined a love story with an anti-bomb story... They carry out the horror of Hiroshima and the sorrow of a lost first love...Hiroshima is a tragedy that shocks us, while the story of love in Nevers makes us cry. The story of Nevers does not trivialize the story of Hiroshima... We gasp at the tragedy of Hiroshima as we weep over the tragedy at Nevers... We contemplate a cosmic and a personal problem at the same time.

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is a kind of film that has great technical ability, illustrating hypothesis plus fact...There is a close-up of Emmanuelle Riva , who has just glanced at Eiji Okada, asleep... Suddenly there is a brief flash-cut of the body of a wounded young man lying in approximately the same position in another place. Resnais' camera moves like a stream from the present to the past and back to the present... It cuts back to Riva's face, and then back to Okada asleep, and in that split second the technique of the subliminal flash cut, used to describe a character's state of mind, is born. This cut is the key to the film, for it is the man whom she calls 'Hiroshima' who reminds her of her lover at Nevers. It is the tragedy of his race that reminds her of the small tragedy of her life...

This identification is carried through in the most neurotic moments of her recitative, when she looks at the Japanese and speaks to him as if he were her German lover of fourteen years before..."Hiroshima, Mon Amour" reflects image and sound, past and present; the actual and the remembered; Hiroshima (a city of neon) and Nevers (a city of gray stone); the personal and the cosmic; a man and a woman; concern for the individual and concern for mankind... Nice film especially for Duras fans.

for more information click here

Hiroshima

This is a real page turner. A bit confusing, but still a great read. I had to get the movie, it was that good. I would tell you about it, but that would spoil it for you. You will just have to buy it.

Riva Rocks (Hi)Roshima

For a controversial movie of its time, it is very understandable happening a couple decades right after world war II. Though an audience of today would ever question how and why there was any potential shock in Emmanauelle Riva's 'Hiroshima Mon Amour, it would have to be of the same reaction watching the movie V for Vendetta(or reading the graphic novel). Both movies have an artform of its time that give a message to its contemporary audience questioning its society and government. Watching either of these movies twenty years down the line gives the feeling of what was happening during those times.

I genuinely liked the movie. The first shock comes from the beginning when it is revealed the French woman is making love to a Japanese man. From an audience, or spectator's point of view, you never see it coming. To have a woman flashing back to her first visit in Hiroshima, while a Japanese man is telling her in French that the events of Hiroshima at that time never existed is a catchy start. There was a lot happening that caught me off guard when the Japanese man was revealed. I begin to lose interest when she is at the pub. I understand it may seem heartless as she is bearing her soul while chugging down beers, but I thought she was getting too crazy. When she goes off telling him about the prison she gets locked in, she makes herself really gruesome and unappealing. It must have been a turnoff for the guy to keep hearing about her first love even though he really was interested.

for more information click here