Hiroshima mon amour (1959)'s activity

The first 15 minutes of Hiroshima Mon Amour are almost unbearable. Marguerite Duras' philosophical poetics meet Alain Resnais' cold modernism is a montage of words and disturbing images of Hiroshima's victims, and you fear the whole film will be like that. The sensual images of two lovers - those who own the voices - break us out of this spell, but only partly. Their pleasure is part of what's disturbing, and seems callous. But the overall theme is that of forgetting. A French actress is in Hiroshima for a film, and has an affair with a Japanese man, which brings memories - through the common filter of World War II trauma - of her first, forbidden love, a German soldier. Love and trauma combined, time acting on both to erase their memories, a threat as much as a promise, something to be feared before it can be desired. And the way she tells her story, projecting her dead lover onto this man, feels like a kind of possession, a temporary transformation. Certainly, there's something alchemical going on between past and present, between pain and pleasure. Emmanuelle Riva is beautiful and powerful in this. Eiji Okada is handsome and intense. Resnais is... Resnais. Which is to say, I'm impressed by the film making, but intellectually, rather than emotionally.