There is a lot said and written and thought about this movie and if I’m honest I don’t feel as though I have much to add. I recognise its venerated status in the cannon but a few days after watching it it has merged in my mind into a single shot of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada talking endlessly as they mosey through the Hiroshima night. It felt in many ways akin to another film that I struggle with, which is Linklater’s Before Sunrise (whilst recognising the influence is of course the other way round). Some films tiptoe the line between pretension and art and some films run the risk of falling into the abyss. Whilst the split Cortazarian narrative is a neat device, with Elle reliving her past in Nevers as she embraces the post-atomic, post-war era, it neither felt as mind-bending as anything Resnais achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, nor as challenging as Nuit et Broiullard, his devastating Holocaust short which was shown before HMA. The use of politics as a semiotic tool is fraught with danger and Resnais’ employment of Hiroshima, the city and the event, feels problematic. Would a filmmaker today get away with a mawkish love story between a Westerner and a Syrian set in Aleppo? We are nearly into Blier territory, and if anything it is the relative lack of confusion which left me cold in HMA. If the film had pushed its characters closer to the abyss, or maintained the cinematic language it adopts in the opening fifteen minutes, perhaps the semiotics of Hiroshima would not seem so ponderous, but it doesn’t and in the end it just feels immeasurably French.
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