Critics reviews

One of the most important films ever made, summing up many tendencies of modern cinema but also indicating new directions for later filmmakers. Its implications and possibilities radiate out in several directions, like the spidery silhouette (in negative?) under the opening credits.

Film Forum is screening [Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad] as a double feature, which sounds as obvious as it is revelatory. It bridges the space between canonical status and the astonishing start of a career, offering a window into a moment when cinema was quickly, definitively changed.

Resnais uses this libretto to shift the very skin of film: Tracking shots and parallel montage in continuous play, the up-angle camera glides through phosphorescent streets and cuts to Manet vistas, a heterogeneity of styles lays bare the tangle of mind and history.

The film visualizes the incongruous contrasts between memory, culture, and history with its fractal editing, a pioneer in the use of deliberately unmatched shots. The cutting in this film violates everything from narrative continuity to constructivist film theory, with a diagonally oriented shot of crossroads that leaps to a setup that stares down a riverbank, a vertical composition that breaks the flow of the mise-en-scène.

The film transfigures cinematic practices and revolutionizes storytelling with a remarkable, nonlinear pilgrimage of passion... An incantatory tone and haunting score linger while you're asked to grapple with how you can be a good person when everything is collapsing around you.

This isn't ordinary conversation, nor is it dramatic speech of the standard "realistic" sort. It's closer in many ways to opera, and Duras's scrupulous choice of words coupled with her keen awareness of their aural impact reaches a crescendo in the film's finale. "You are Hiroshima," Riva says to her Japanese amour, to which Okada responds: "And you are Nevers—Nevers in France." Thus individual lives are bound to the fate of nations.

The seminal-ovulary date-night ordeal of the fresh-baked French New Wave, this moody, swoony benchmark was one of those movies — and in 1959-60 you had scores to choose from — that could remake your young life and redefine your ideas of what's tragic, romantic, and grown-up cool in the postwar world.

Comics were always on Resnais' mind—and they're all over Hiroshima Mon Amour. The movie's deft handling of flashbacks and memory treats each shot as a panel. The relationship it creates between them is the definition of sequential art. The emotional depth it manages to create from the juxtaposition of these images suggests another word: graphic novel.

The importance of bearing witness preoccupied Alain Resnais in the years prior to directing his first feature length film. Hiroshima mon amour, the result of that concern, remains one of cinema's most profound meditations on the horror of war, suffering and forgetting... A film of tremendous beauty and gravity, the experience of Hiroshima mon amour lasts long after the screen fades to black.

As much as it's a movie of an intense romanticism, it's also a work of aesthetic philosophy, in which filmmaker and screenwriter alike question the very nature of what a story is, of how a character is composed, of what it is to be an integral person at a time when world events are so incomprehnsibly horrific as to shatter the psyche.

The first half of Resnais's seemingly deathless totem is beautiful, the past and present and future of that "19th-century invention" cinema in 2007 just as it was in 1959. Why, then, do those final 45 minutes exist? Of course, this being Resnais, "it's all theater" — but this being Japan, it's noh, and kabuki, and whatever else paved the way for the hyperbolic "Tokyo-ga," that method of presenting actors on-screen devised by Kurosawa and mass-produced by the Art Theater Guild sawmill.

Where the Godard film [Breathless] feels like a free-jazz improvisation, the Resnais feels like a piece of atonal music with the weight of history on its shoulders—Ornette Coleman vs. Anton Webern. Such seriousness of purpose is now considered a high crime in most critical circles. But that's a passing fad, and no allowances or apologies are needed for the terrible beauty wrought by Resnais and his key collaborator, the great Marguerite Duras.