© 2014 by James Clark
Alain Resnais is a filmmaker widely revered as a harbinger of the many contemporary filmic launches testing our tolerance for risk and innovation. Unlike many of those he supposedly inspired, his was not a career with much staying power in the limelight. As we prepare to size up his signature (and debut) piece, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), we’ll begin with the conundrum of supposed dynamite branding having apparently lost its way, or at least having lost its compellingness. The supposed magic touch, of our film at issue here (produced in association with screenwriter [novelist, playwright, and filmmaker] Marguerite Duras), pertains to his bringing to quite unnerving immediacy an impasse between the two protagonists. Let us posit, for the sake of coming to savor singular energies here (accounting for an early noteworthiness and niche patronage but no significant subscription to his method) which have perhaps not effectively made it on to the global radar, that it is the weight of world-historical inundation which ushers in a type of crisis both devastating and manageable. More succinctly, I’d like to propose that we are not (horrific details and pundits notwithstanding) getting ourselves into the onset of a death march, but instead a joyousness in being under heavy but not impossible fire. Resnais haunts later film not for depiction of hopeless decadence; but instead for getting under its skin the marvel of a daunting competence.
There is at the very beginning of this plunge into feature film work a riveting pulse of cross-cut juxtaposition between lovers close to death in having their lovemaking permanently interrupted by reams of dust and nuclear ash and lovers the sweatiness of which speaks to some form of futurity. The former lovers were a slice of the hapless thousands of residents of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The latter are a slice, at the same place 14 years later, of those (like all of us) seeking direction in face of a much older bomb; but a bomb having, at long last, become no longer completely ignorable. This passage shows both scintillation—hungry couples in extreme close-up, with hands, arms, shoulders and upper back in motion and in stillness hearkening to primeval biology. But, very early on in this montage, the biological fast-forwards to human sentience, to carnal consciousness capable of subtle power (recalling thereby the opening of Kubrick’s 2001). First the coming to full potential slips out of the morass of parched earth nearly concealing the first couple. The man’s caresses pass over a configuration that could be facial features (an eye, her mouth) but that seems more likely to be her clothing. From there we hear much more about the second couple, our protagonists, on the brink of offering to us civilizational complexities exploding into an incalculable future. The man introduces a motif that will carry right through to the film’s final second, a line of contentious observation that seems quite out of place with such visually absorbing intimacy: “You saw nothing of Hiroshima. Nothing… What was there for you to weep over?”
Though drawn to each other in one obvious dimension—the visual tone poem has their sweat drying and then drenching them again as if caught in a tropical downpour—this is a liaison of hidden depths (the kind of topology alert auteurs would recognize to be something to ponder). The optics of the two actors, Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, further complicate this instantaneous skirmish mounted upon a wave of delicate (even if rather abstract) affection. The deliverer of the discord seems a rather bland, self-possessed young professional (we soon learn he’s an architect, in a place with a very large market for constructs) with a sanguine presence and a kindly demeanor. It is the visitor who presents as edgy, a handsome, youngish woman with large, intense eyes and a formidable expressive range. (We soon learn that she is an actress, in Japan to star in an anti-war, anti-atomic-weapons polemic.) She quickly disputes his going for her jugular in that way, citing the extensive preparation she has put herself through (including four visits to the local museum devoted to conveying the terrible event), and the minutiae of that horror about which she protests her strong commitment to prevent any repetition occurring. “I saw everything. I watched the people, I myself lost in thought… looked at the scorched metal, metal made as vulnerable as flesh…” To further dramatize her ardent possession of the torture, she swings into declaring about feeling like one of the victims (200,000 dead; 80,000 gruesomely maimed). “I was hot in Peace Square. 10,000 degrees in Peace Square. How could you not know it?”
“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing,” he maintains. And yet their body language sustains ardor, warmth and gentle delicacy. Let’s suppose he was somehow impelled to strip away her cosmopolitan Caucasian tourist good manners, for the sake of a showdown about something hidden by all that self-bolstering correctness. Let’s suppose the bomb-blast crisis as to elemental energy is informed by another shock of elemental energy which he finds much more absorbing than the political miasma she seems wedded to. But, then, why is he with her in this rapt way? Soon we realize that this increasingly strange conjunction is taking place in her hotel room. She goes on to remark that, “This time tomorrow, I’ll be on my way back to France.” To which he asks, “Is that why you invited me here? How ugly you were…” [at a reception for the celebrities, implanted with local sparkplugs]. “I’m glad you finally noticed me,” she smoothly notes…” “Ever notice that people have a way of noticing what they want?” he asks (first of all about his not paying any heed to her not speaking Japanese [and about his very accomplished French that covered the deficit]; but now reaching into the thematic heart of intent). Despite the major part of her patter (the ugliness), her daring had met, at some level, the motion he was predisposed to notice. At the waning phase of their volleying about acuity toward the military-implicated disaster, her filibuster makes a turn into skepticism and disorientation more compatible with her noticeable appetite for risk. “The explanations [in the museum] for lack of anything else… It will begin again. The asphalt will burn… How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove…? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. Please devour me…Defer me to ugliness.”
The all-important first passage winds down with her back on the moral crusade hobby horse; but, as such, it gives rise to a catch phrase which forms the keystone of the film’s architecture. “I saw the pictures of the innocent drawn to a fate so unjust. A child warped and blind. The women risk giving birth. Rain causes panic… Anger about the principle of inequality of races… The city rises up in anger…” He rebuts this paean to victimhood with, “No. You are not endowed with memory…” And he etches for both of them an emblem about the difficult turf on which their meeting revolves. “You’re like a thousand women in one” [an apt spokesperson for omnipresent banality; a singular source of kinetic power]. He may look and sound and act like a mild-mannered Clark Kent. But, being endowed with a true Amazon (namely, Marguerite Duras) powering his shadowy course, he’s about the hell on wheels that has in truth made this picture an unforgettable adventure.
“I don’t mind being a thousand women in one for you,” she tells him. But is she up to the flattering measure of that phrase? Immediately on pronouncing herself a closet Wonder Woman, she gets into a little tizzy about the sound of a passer-by. “Every morning he passes at 4 and coughs…” Then she asks the disconcertingly dull question, “Were you in Hiroshima?” [when the bomb hit]. His, “No, of course not!” must entail feeling he’s struggling with a glove that’s way too small. Actress Emmanuelle Riva carries off with a remarkable pitch of sobriety the various stupidities she has to emit. He would be very alert to her (like him) not showing her full hand; and so, just before their getting on with their day, he asks where she was based before this trip. “Paris,” is the reply. “And before Paris?”/ “Nevers…” Masterfully, the writing, as eliciting superb performance, has her gradually revealing (in momentary flashbacks) aspects of Nevers and its true pain and then beginning to reveal them to him and us—all the while giving off movie magazine chatter to the tune of, “It [the Hiroshima project] interested me… It’s a film about peace. What would you expect in Hiroshima?” This flaccid gesture cues his challenge, “When you talk I wonder whether you lie or not.” Her reply is both flippant and self-revealing: “I tell the truth and I lie… I have dubious morals, you know…” (Though the immediate subject is her supposed fondness for men and where that leaves him, the major concern of being true to knowing Hiroshima at its depths exerts a retainer on a whole range of questions of integrity.) She wakens before him and notices how his arm and hand trail on the bed as he sleeps on his stomach. This sends her into a very brief flashback of the arm and hand of the dead German soldier, her lover, as an eighteen-year-old in Nevers, and, and her kissing his blood-spattered face. Soon afterward, he presses his appetite for close notice of her divided presence. “You were bored in a way that makes a man want to know a woman… Nevers, a beautiful word…” She bristles, “A word like any other. Just like the town.” He notices how stricken (“ugly”) her face is. Suddenly she angrily goes inside from the balcony where they were having their bite to eat before facing the day. He smiles slightly, in being in the midst of a discovery of great compellingness to him.
Now in her nurse’s costume for the role in that film (being like a thousand others?), she and he caress, an action having been repeated nearly all through the night; and he begins what turns out to be a long, rather graceless petition. “I’d like to see you again.” Here, with the overflow of her shock waves about the dead lover becoming critical, she rather ruthlessly (and melodramatically) declares, “At this time tomorrow, I’ll be on my way back to France. There was no point in telling you.” But she clearly redeems herself straightaway. Very direct about having had such brief encounters in the past (“… not that often… But they happen… I have dubious morals, you know…”)—not, therefore, exactly in the mold of the Brief Encounter—she prompts him to ask, “What is dubious morals?” And she drills that cagey slo-pitch a surprising distance: “Being dubious about other people’s morals.” (Being offside about demonstrative correctness regarding victims vastly upstaging mere sleeping around as the ne plus ultra of evil.)
“I’d like to see you again.”/ “No!” [She rushes off the bed]/ “Why?”/ “Because!” Moments before, he had, in answer to her wondering about his line of work, told her he was an architect, but added, more to the point, “… and I’m also interested in politics,” Clearly he was already dubious about her as a possibly coherent adult, and far more on track to engage her as a volatile alien piquing his fascination about contrarian instincts failing to come to fruition. As they exit the Hotel New Hiroshima, he returns to the clearly incendiary subject of Nevers. Knowing full well the answer, but wanting to sift through everything about the question, he incites an uprising with, “Are you going to Nevers?” She inadvertently helps with, “I’m never going to Nevers.”/ “Never?”/ “Never… I was never younger than I was in Nevers… And crazy [fou] in Nevers, too. Nevers is the one place in the world I dream of at night.” Having induced her to begin to pour out the self-pity and self-dramatization monopolizing her life, he zeroes in on specifics of that “madness” (fou) he himself knows very well (better, in fact, than she does). She tells him, “Madness is like intelligence…We can’t explain it. It comes over you. And then you understand. But when it’s gone, you no longer understand it at all.” That would be an admission that the volatility of dynamic creativity is beyond effective direction. That would be a very dubious disposition—and he knows it. So he proceeds: “Were you full of hate?” She, badly and transparently misrepresenting her finer moments, claims, “That was my madness. I was mad with hate. I felt I could make a career of hate… All I cared about was hating. Do you understand?” His “Yes” has been positioned at an expressive register that is novelistic to be sure. But it also comes to bear within the cusp of a second phase of the filmic architecture, which draws us into the full physical heft and dare of the dilemma hitherto so dazzlingly couched in speech. (You could say that the starkly stylized sweaty coitus of the opening, the mad [fou] attraction—not exactly equal—anticipates getting out in the open the bite of conflict between them, ever-so-mellowed by their contrasting erudition.)
There is a little epigraph to this chapter by her—so sharply wrong-headed (wrong-hearted)—launching their circulation in the great outdoors. She takes his “yes” about knowing what it is to hate, as concerning a form of predictable resentment that such punishment was administered 14 years before. “You must have gone through that.” He wonders, “Did it [comprehensive hate] ever happen again?” Her “No, it went away little by little,” overlooks the lower-key histrionics indelibly imprinted on nearly every move she makes. “It’s over,” she claims. “And then I had children, of course…” (Of course, as it transpires, they’re both “happily” married [both spouses far away, temporarily].) He avers, “To see you again today [in the last few minutes when they’ll inhabit the same place] would really be ‘seeing you again.’” She had wavered, “Me, too,” regarding his desire to spend a few days with her, “somewhere, sometime…” Then she says. “No,” rushes into her studio taxi and disappears. He is, for a few seconds, crestfallen, and he says, “Very well.” Then he smiles a wry smile. (Before that, as he turns and leaves during one of her vetoes, she calls out, in a strange show of coquettish pettiness, “It’s because you know I’m leaving tomorrow!” He shoots back, “That may be part of it [the probe having come to sifting a disaster; the probe having been ravished by life reduced to flings]… But it’s as good a reason as any, isn’t it?”)
That repartee comes close to the taunts you’d overhear were you on a battlefield, with infantry pickets, advance guards, trading strangely light-hearted insults. There is a quick cut to the film set (another battle zone) where, with calculated noise and commotion (quite a lurch for us, having spent a full half hour within virtual immobility), we have a bout of that city which “rises up in anger.” Bemusingly upstaging the faux heroics, she is half asleep on the sidelines, caressing a white kitten; and he comes along and tells her, “I think I love you.” She, with a funereal face, is saddened in face of a children’s procession; they get swept apart by hordes of placard-waving, stampeding young bucks; they then find themselves at his pristine house; they prove how virtually impossible it is to make sense of the bed, as before; and, before you know it, they’re at a nightclub with prominent signage reading, “Casablanca.”
The earthquake-like trajectory of their rearguard drift is, in her case, just desultory enough and, in his case, just hopeful (or at least intrigued) enough to bring about an extraordinary transparency of the complication, pain and joy of drastically challenging innovation. At his place, he tells her (in response to her curiosity) that his wife is very beautiful, that he’s “happy with her” and that the latter is “in the mountains” on some domestic errand. You could say that this is the beginning of some mountain climbing for them. She, perhaps having absorbed too many movies (without digesting them), rushes to maintain, “I’m a woman who’s happy with her husband… The whole thing is ridiculous!” And they go on to enjoy, sort of, a passionate kiss. Yes, as we’ll see, Noel Coward’s (and David Lean’s) Brief Encounter comes to bear here, replete with a train station and a pesky woman getting in their way there (and I, for one, find Resnais’ zeal for such uncomfortable exposures to be brilliantly apt). In light of the optics of this compelling but doomed climb, her full account (nudged forward in bed by the family man) of the drama of Nevers and her devotion to a long-gone lover falls far short of the sublime. As she details that unforgettable rendezvous, we see, in flash-back, her gliding on her bike through lovely grey countryside and finding sheds and the like to disappear in. “Like everyone else,” she stipulates, they traded up from bars to houses. “We planned to live in Bavaria, in the Alps.” He notes, “I’m only beginning to know you [surely a strategic inaccuracy]… I somehow understand that you were becoming what you are today.” This elicits from her, “Nevers, where I turned twenty!” She goes on from there to enthuse about the light in the Nevers region. “So very soft… if only you knew!” Her wisps of recollection of something sensually, primally incisive spill into the saccharine. From there we see the flashback as she tells him about her becoming a pariah after the War, having her hair shaved off and being hidden away in the cellar by her mortified father. More girlish soap opera—“I yearn for you so badly, I can’t stand it anymore!” She tells of her scraping her hands on the bricks of the cellar walls, then licking the blood. “I loved blood since I had tasted yours” (seen earlier in the flashback elicited by the architect’s hand on the bed). He pushes a button to gauge the damage. “Do you spit in your mother’s face?”/ “Yes!”
On to a bar, not yet the full-blown Casablanca (in fact a “tea room” tweaked for catastrophic times). There he repeatedly refills her glass with beer. She screams, “I was young once!” After a jag of sentiment about the relentless passage of time, she declaims, “I’ll remember you [as it comes to light, the political architect is the only one in her circle who knows about Nevers] as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness…” (She remarks in tragic style, “I don’t remember his [the soldier/lover’s] hands… We’ll probably die without ever seeing each other again…”) She cuts off this rant she senses to be cheapening her situation by walking (rather tipsily) along dark, empty streets to her hotel with the upbeat name. On treading up the spare, modernist stairway and reaching her door along an antiseptic corridor, she rushes away only to return a few seconds later. Splashing water over her face in the bathroom where we almost expect her to overdose, she talks to her macabre and sweet muse—“I told our story. You see it was there to tell. 14 years since I’ve tasted an impossible love!” She makes it back to the tea room, where she sits at a curb, the picture of a victim beyond normal society. He has followed her and she thinks to herself, “Of course I’ll stay in Hiroshima with you… I wasn’t expecting this at all!” She glares at him and shouts, “Go away!” She plods along a dark roadway and he follows at a distance. “Stay in Hiroshima with me,” he insists. She tells herself, “He’s going to kiss me and I’ll be lost.” Then, in another stroke of inspiration from the auteur who required lots of infrastructural assistance but knew how to make pictures hum, their entourage is met by two, well-groomed, personable young men playing acoustic guitars. They aren’t exactly the Everly Brothers (those experts on the subject of adolescent crushes); but they’ll do—and then some! Soon she is amidst the neon firestorm of the entertainment district (which even includes the Vegas touch of a faux Eiffel Tower on a rooftop). As he approaches her, she—like a punter who has had too much fun—peevishly addresses her guide/ lover, “Who are you? You’re destroying me!” Then she has a reverie, heavy on noirish femme fatale self-promotion. “I was hungry. Hungry for infidelity, for adultery, for lies and for death… I always have been. I had no doubt I’d meet you… Devour me. Deform me to your likeness. So that no one after you will ever know the reason for so much desire… We’ll be alone, my love…” She stands under the overhang of the tea room in the rain. He reappears in the shadows, by a sign in English—“Oasis.” He bids for a week, 3 days… She ripostes, “Time for what? To live for it? To die for it? Time enough to know which? So I don’t give a damn!” He tells her, “I would prefer you had died in Nevers” [the situation of near-yet-far fraying the disinterested pace he’d been able to manage thus far]. “So would I,” she admits, not nearly so surprisingly. That sends her to the train station where more graceful parting is in the air. (Her inability to stop promoting herself activates a converse rush of the well-achieved silent endurance of impasse the woman in Brief Encounter brings off. Our protagonist does directly evoke that shadowy resilience in labelling her own babbling—about seeing Nevers “where my body was ablaze with his memory…”—as “Dime Store Romance.”)
Their parting at the station (on foot, perhaps to further establish the pedestrian qualities of their constellation) puts onstream the more than political exertions of Casablanca. Unlike the always bubbling Rick’s, this Casablanca night-spot is all but a morgue; and the recent arrival to town precedes by a little while the local lover. She is alone at a table, and he sits at a table nearby. An enterprising pimp leaves a table where he was sitting with some of his female staff and comes over to hers, in hopes of getting her into a new movie (the mix-up in Brief Encounter now threatening to go off the rails). The architect glares as the king of the night shift smoothly addresses her: “Are you alone? May I sit down?” And there they sit till daybreak—no further steps to be taken. She returns to the hotel, a home base about to be no more. He follows, saying, lost in paradox, “I had to come.” She cries and says, “I’ll forget you. I’m forgetting you already… Hi ro shi ma—that’s your name…” He picks up that building block. (Or is it a system of primal energy?) “Yes, that’s my name.” And, with a send-off both gentle and devastating, he smiles and tells her, “And your name is Nevers, in France…” Real absence. Real politics. Real devastation.
