Hiroshima Mon Amour - one way, or another.

It’s hard to say if Hiroshima Mon Amour is a classic love story that deals with loss, infidelity, memory, struggle, sanity, miscommunication, conflict, time, and fate by using historical tragedy to give it context and backbone, or if it’s a film about a historical tragedy and collective memory involving those same elements that uses a classic love story to draw the viewer in and make the personal universal and the universal personal. The long opening shot and the “wacky” and foreboding music, with the eventual transition into a shot of intertwined bodies that looked, depending on the moment, like they were covered in rubble, then maybe snowflakes, then maybe sweat all led me to believe I was situated pretty squarely in a rather digestible narrative fiction film. However, the film quickly moves into a dialogue between 2 antagonistic voices that are presumably the voices of the lovers, yet seem to almost float above their actions, (it’s hard to tell if the conversation itself is actually happening, or if it’s just in the head of one character, or if it is a conversation that *could* happen between them) as we see footage of a museum dedicated to the bombing of Hiroshima. Here, there is a layering of films within films and memories within memories. We have a film in the present moment (the lovers) whose dialogue gives way to a flash back to a museum trip experienced by one character that happened in the near past, that then collapses into another memory/flashback belonging to both the whole world as well as a character - and within that flashback of the bombing of Hiroshima there is both actual archival footage (we assume it is real footage) and films made by the museum that Elle says something like “they did their best to reconstruct it”. We also see shots of present day Hiroshima, of little roadside gift shops and a bus company that gives tours of the city and ruins called “Atomic Tours”, which comes across as a criticism of the industry of tragedy – or perhaps the cheapening/exploitation of memory and tragedy. Is the past all that Hiroshima has to offer, or has become a testament to? This montage of tourist attractions made me curious about what lies beneath the surface of Hiroshima, and what lies ahead.
Once we are (momentarily) back in the present, our characters continue to linger around in bed, getting dressed and growing curious about one another – they have a lot of chemistry, but don’t really know each other that well and are waking up to that reality. Once Lui starts asking Elle questions about herself, she seems to quickly degenerate from a confident and bold mood (she “likes men” and enjoys “occasional” one-night stands, though married) to someone with a lot of burdens who is tormented about something in the past. Elle gets out of bed and wanders about the apartment, but as she watches Lui sleep, she has flashbacks to the moment when her first love died. We learn later that Elle is developing feelings of “love” for Lui, and probably hasn’t felt such feelings since her first love died; she says later in the film “I cheated on you with that stranger tonight”. For her, falling in love again was a betrayal of her first love. Lui, too, is “falling in love” with Elle, and is persistent on learning what makes her tick.
Lui spends the rest of the night trying to make sense of Elle, and so do we. Elle eventually opens up to Lui about her past, and we learn about the death of her first love, her isolation, shaming, and consequent insanity. Suddenly, we are wondering about the reliability of our narrator. As dawn approaches, Elle and Lui chase each other around in circular dialogue as well as the city – each trying to decide what to do about the future. As their situation becomes more and more of a time-sensitive moral dilemma (we don’t really know what their future will look like or what decision they will make before Elle’s plane takes off….not unlike the ending of Casablanca - referenced in this film), the characters grow more iconic. Elle is a site caught in, or between, the past and present, in need of some sort of resolution in order to have a future. Lui is like a stand-in for that seemingly impossible future. Both characters are larger than themselves, while becoming memories even in the present moment. Lui becomes Hiroshima, and Elle becomes Nevers. She is a jumble of horrible memories and trauma, and he, somehow, seems to persevere through his.
The film doesn’t provide any answers to the questions it asks – and I found myself tempted to resolve it one way or the other. Are our hearts, and are our histories healed in forgetting, or in insisting on remembering? In the end, the film seems to speak to the futility of this dilemma and perhaps to the futility of choosing between the falsehood of an “objective documentary” or a twisted, collapsing love story as the best way to explore these questions. At least, that’s how I saw it.