Hiroshima Mon Amour

With growing protests against Japan’s return to militarization, civic groups and trade unions have put together their combined strength to stop such moves.

The protesters hope that by gathering huge crowds, the Shinzo Abe government will listen to them. They don’t want war. 

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his ruling coalition have passed security bills that will change Japan’s constitution against war.  It will now allow Japanese troops to fight overseas.

Abe claims that the “changes will enable Japan to respond more effectively to security threats from a more assertive China, a nuclear-armed North Korea and Islamist terrorism. Opinion polls show a majority of voters oppose the move.

Japan was not preparing for war when I first saw the film “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” I loved the film because it was about “remembering and forgetting.”

Something we do all the time.

Hiroshima Mon Amour has been reviewed many times by countless critics. When I first saw it I thought it was – “the comparison between heart break and the Hiroshima bombing.” That is beautiful.

 “Just as the pain of lost love will be forgotten so too have the horrors of Hiroshima. The scars will always be there but that feeling of pain and isolation as the world celebrates while you mourn will be lost in the past.”

That lesson stayed in my mind.

The plot is simple. It is about a Japanese architect, Lui who is helping to rebuild Hiroshima and Elle is a Frenchwoman who has fled Nevers, when her community condemned her for falling in love with a German soldier.

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Many do not like the film because they expect a happy ending. All the scenes encourage the wish for happiness when strangers become lovers. There is no happy ending. Indeed it is profoundly sad.

As one reviewer wrote “it could not have a happy ending because that is not what the film is about. It is less about a man and a woman than it is about how humans cope when their worlds become tragic.”

The characters represent different cities; the Japanese man, Hiroshima, the French woman, a city in France, Nevers but the latter might as well represent any outside nation. While “Hiroshima,” even after being destroyed by an “ally” of France, falls in love with her and wants her to stay, despite his claims that she can never know what the bombing was really like, yet leaving this in the past without forgetting. “France” is hung up on the memory of a dead Nazi soldier whom she had loved..

The soldier does not represent the Nazis, but rather “a real, true love that transcended nationalities and associations.”

“France’s past is personal and fears forgetting it, while Hiroshima’s is communal and, while not wanting to forget, also wants to move ahead. For this reason Hiroshima keeps trying to convince France to stay so that they can be in love, but France is too preoccupied with its own personal ghost that it cannot share, which is why it is a major breakthrough for her when she finally tells her tragic story for the first time to anyone, Hiroshima.”

I find the theme as the most poignant because wish as she might it will eventually be forgotten like Hiroshima would, despite all the pain and suffering it brought to many people.

“Hiroshima’s past tragedy being communal is shared and it wants to share with the rest of the world. France’s tragedy is personal and is only beginning to be shared. It takes the entire film before the two characters can get to a beginning of something more than their differences and likenesses of tragedy and loss in the past, and this beginning is who they really are, in the present, two people reborn from these tragedies.

It is not just a rambling ‘romance story’ in Hollywood style. “It is literally a movie in which the camera films little more than the memories of two strangers – and the emotional conundrums that expand when their owners meet, and combine. “

They might have begun a new relationship but this does not happen and they go to and from their indecision as the night falls. She leaves the next day.

Their conversation begins – and becomes – the movie.

The rest of the plot is very simple: the woman rises for her day’s filming, but her lover, who becomes increasingly absorbed and obsessed with her, follows her. The last third of the movie is set in the bar they met at the night before, where he attempts to convince her to stay in Hiroshima. (At the end of the film, this is still left ambiguous). There is a montage or two, there are flashbacks deployed which help reveal the woman’s past up to this trip to Hiroshima.

The nature of the relationship between the pair reduces everything else to ornament, prelude and ephemera to their contact.

What develops the tension is the crucially important dialogue the pair has with each other. Because of the complexity of the verbal revelations, it is the dialogue that becomes dominant in this film. It’s hard to explain. The two people are merely telling each other stories of how they grew up; they talk about where they were the day that US forces dropped the atomic bomb. The man was a soldier in the Japanese army at the time, she was a young girl in a small town in France. She had been in love with a soldier who died.

“She is speaking to the Japanese man but really she is talking to her past lover. So, all is not what it seems. Growth is really destruction, peace is really war, love is really death as seen through the prism of this woman’s history – that’s why she’s in Hiroshima. And it is this ‘doubling-over’ and multiplicity of character with its symbol that is the heart of this film.”

“It is a dialogue not just between two lovers but between two people and their pasts. There are surfaces under surfaces. All of the elements are in juxtaposition. All of them are mirrored. All of them are in conflict. All of them are in alignment. The movie swirls with rich, intermeshed images, symbols, allusions, and metaphors.”

“Hiroshima Mon Amour is a story about being alive and being human. It is about the pain of loving or losing one’s love and the greater torment at having to relinquish that pain we sometimes wish to nurse and hold on to. These are sometimes the effects that loving someone has on your soul; and I will go out on a limb and say that its never been treated better than in this movie.”

It is especially worth remembering today as we read that the country most hurt by atomic bombing is preparing for war again.