Hiroshima Mon Amour movie storyline. A French woman and a Japanese man have an affair while she is in Japan making a film about peace and the impact of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, The man, an architect, lost his family in the bombing. She recalls her lover during the war, a 23 year-old German soldier who later died. Despite the time they spend together, her attachment appears minimal and they go forward into the future.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is a 1959 French New Wave romantic drama film directed by French film director Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It’s Resnais’ first feature-length work. It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness. It was a major catalyst for the Left Bank Cinema, making use of miniature flashbacks to create a nonlinear storyline.
It brought international attention to the new movement in French cinema, along with films like Breathless and The 400 Blows. The film features Resnais’ innovative use of brief flashbacks sequences to suggest a flash of memories. The movie is widely considered to be one of the influential movies of the French New Wave. In 2012, director Roy Andersson chose it as one of the greatest movies of all time.
According to James Monaco, Resnais was originally commissioned to make a short documentary about the atomic bomb, but spent several months confused about how to proceed because he did not want to recreate his 1956 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. He later went to his producer and joked that the film could not be done unless Marguerite Duras was involved in writing the screenplay.
The film was a co-production by companies from both Japan and France. The producers stipulated that one main character must be French and the other Japanese, and also required that the film be shot in both countries employing film crews comprising technicians from each.
Hiroshima Mon Amour earned an Oscar nomination for screenwriter Marguerite Duras as well as the Fipresci International Critics’ Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where the film was excluded from the official selection because of its sensitive subject matter of nuclear bombs as well as to avoid upsetting the U.S. government It won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association in 1960. In 2002, it was voted by the international contributors of the French film magazine Positif to be one of the top 10 films since 1952, the first issue of the magazine.
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Directed by: Alain Resnais
Starring: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernard Fresson
Screenplay by: Marguerite Duras
Production Design by: Sacha Kamenka, Takeo Shirakawa
Cinematography by: Michio Takahashi, Sacha Vierny
Film Editing by: Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi, Anne Sarraute
Costume Design by: Gerard Collery
Makeup Department: Alexandre Marcus, Éliane Marcus
Music by: Georges Delerue, Giovanni Fusco
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Pathé Films
Release Date: June 10, 1959
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